What makes for an enjoyable protagonist? An analysis of character warmth and competence

TL;DR

This study examines how the warmth and competence of movie protagonists influence audience ratings, finding modest effects and highlighting the limited role of character personality compared to other factors.

Contribution

It introduces an AI-assisted method for quantifying character traits across a large film dataset and explores their relationship with audience ratings across genres.

Findings

Warmth and competence have small but significant effects on ratings.

Male protagonists are slightly less warm but receive higher ratings.

Character traits are less influential than protagonist gender in predicting ratings.

Abstract

Drawing on psychological and literary theory, we investigated whether the warmth and competence of movie protagonists predict IMDb ratings, and whether these effects vary across genres. Using 2,858 films and series from the Movie Scripts Corpus, we identified protagonists via AI-assisted annotation and quantified their warmth and competence with the LLM_annotate package ([1]; human-LLM agreement: r = .83). Preregistered Bayesian regression analyses revealed theory-consistent but small associations between both warmth and competence and audience ratings, while genre-specific interactions did not meaningfully improve predictions. Male protagonists were slightly less warm than female protagonists, and movies with male leads received higher ratings on average (an association that was multiple times stronger than the relationships between movie ratings and warmth/competence). These findings suggest that, although audiences tend to favor warm, competent characters, the effects on movie evaluations are modest, indicating that character personality is only one of many factors shaping movie ratings. AI-assisted annotation with LLM_annotate and gpt-4.1-mini proved effective for large-scale analyses but occasionally fell short of manually generated annotations.