High concordance rates in the categorization of movies

When asking people how much they liked a given movie, their agreement is low. Thiscould be due to them disagreeing about what they saw or agreeing about what theysaw but disagreeing about its valence. Film theorists, historians, and critics suggestthat the categorization of films is an arduous, and frequently inconsistent task. In orderto test whether this is the case empirically, we asked participants to categorize—bygenres that we provided— a list of movies that was previously used in research onappraisal. We find that whereas people do not use all genres at an equal proportion,they do so consistently across observers—at a rate that is surprisingly high. We alsofind that this concordance in genre classification is highest if people were exposed to asimilar cultural experience, such as a film studies program, whereas other factors suchas biological sex or the number of movies seen did not matter. We conclude thatdifferences in appraisal cannot be attributed to differences in categorical perception.