The Effect of Gender and Criticism on a Viewer's Opinion

Essay by GuitarmyUniversity, Bachelor'sA, January 2007

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Film critics are an insightful source for moviegoers. For those that are unsure whether to attend a movie, critiques allow consumers to evaluate the film's worthiness. Research has shown that individual evaluations of a movie commonly reflect those of well-recognized critics. Furthermore, consumers' evaluations of a film are more likely to follow a critic's when the critique is distinct from the critic's common attitude towards films (i.e., when the critic is a well-established harsh arbiter, but suddenly makes a gracious comment). (d'Astous, Touil, 1999).

This experiment sought two hypothesizes, the first was to find a positive correlation between the critical comment about the clip and the viewer's opinion (did the criticism influence the viewer's opinion) and the second was whether the gender of the critic would steer the viewer's opinion.

Introduction

Research has shown that individual evaluations of new movies are more likely to follow a critic's judgment when the critique is consistent with other critiques and when there is favourable consensus.

People are also more likely to follow a critic's opinion if the critic is well established; this is especially true if the review is negative (d'Astous, Touil 1999).

Although there is research that suggests criticism will affect a viewer's opinion, there does not exist any experiments that test both the effect of gender and criticism. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the gender of the critic will influence a viewer's judgment about a film. It is expected that when subjects are exposed to both positive and negative reviews of the same film, the gender if the critic will manipulate their opinion.

Materials

*The DVD chosen is "the Red Violin" it has 4 unique scenes which all have one topic which is a violin, but the stories of each person in the movie are unique. They...