Linguistic gender congruity differentially correlates with film and novel ratings by critics and audiences.

The film and publishing industries are fraught with gender disparities, with men overpowering nearly every sector of these domains. For instance, men are not only paid more than women in the film industry, but they also outnumber women in positions such as director, screenwriter, and lead acting roles. Similarly, women often resort to assuming gender-neutral or male pseudonyms to increase their prospects in the publishing industry. This widespread gender inequality in the film and publishing industries raises the question of how writers' gender relates to gendered language and narrative receptions. Two archival studies examined whether gender-linked language relates to film (N = 521) and novel (N = 150) ratings, and whether those associations differ as a function of writer gender or the expertise of the rater (professional critics and lay audience members). Results demonstrated that female screenwriters and novelists used a more feminine style of writing, whereas male screenwriters and novelists used a more masculine style of writing. Lay audiences gave more positive ratings to films and novels by writers who used a more gender-congruent writing style, in contrast with professional critics, who gave more positive reviews to films by writers who used a more gender-incongruent writing style. Our findings substantiate past research regarding the differing tastes of lay audiences and professional critics in addition to lending insight into subtle social dynamics that may sustain gender biases in the film and publishing industries.

Genre-typical narrative arcs in films are less appealing to lay audiences and professional film critics.

People tend to like stimuli-ranging from human faces to text-that are prototypical, and thus easily processed. However, recent research has suggested that less typical stimuli may be preferred in creative contexts, such as fine art or music lyrics. In an archival sample of movie scripts, we tested whether genre-typicality predicted film ratings as a function of rater role (novice audience member or expert film critic). Genre-typicality was operationalized as the profile correlations between linguistic arcs (across five segments, or acts) for each script and within-genre averages. We predicted (1) that critics would prefer more disfluent (genre-atypical) films and general audiences would prefer fluent (genre-typical) films, and (2) that these differences would be most pronounced for genres expected to be more entertaining (e.g., action/adventure) than challenging (e.g., tragedy). Partly consistent with our hypotheses, the results showed that critics gave higher ratings to action/adventure films with less typical positive emotion arcs. However, regardless of audience-member or professional-critic status, higher ratings were attributed to films that were more genre-atypical (or disfluent), in terms of analytic thinking, narrative action, and emotional tone, across all genres except family/kids films. Such findings support the growing literature on the appeal of disfluency in the arts and have relevance for researchers in psychology and computer science who are interested in computational linguistic approaches to attitudes, film, and literature.