Here's an interesting experiment for you: The next time you attend a movie at a theater, try to notice how the people you go with influence your own opinion of the movie. According to a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, how other people respond to the movie closely influences our own response. What's more, we tend to enjoy movies more when our responses line up with others, regardless of how good the film is, researchers found.

“When asked how much they had liked the film, participants reported higher ratings the more their assessments lined up with the other person,” say University of Chicago researchers Suresh Ramanathan and Ann L. McGill. “By mimicking expressions, people catch each other’s moods leading to a shared emotional experience. That feels good to people and they attribute that good feeling to the quality of the movie.”

Interestingly, those little glances we shoot each other in a movie theater tend to affect us pretty dramatically, the researchers found. The influence was mutual, too; no "leader personality" directed the responses, consciously or otherwise. This was even true although study subjects responded differently to specific scenes within a movie.

This study was the first to examine emotional responses in study subjects who freely responded to each other, rather than a study-directed "plant" who expressed agreement or disagreement in order to explore responses.

Comments (0)