Download pdf
What Makes the Movie More "Colourful"? A Discussion on Diversity and Social Psychological Theories
- 1 University of Warwick
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Movies are one of the most widely accepted and loved forms of art, and their extremely high level of acceptance and circulation has made them a vehicle for many political and artistic ideas. The accessibility of movies also makes the narratives they convey more deeply rooted in people’s minds. This is reflected not only in the educational and pedagogical functions of schools, but also in the daily impact on people’s values and worldviews. One noticeable trend about movies is that there is an increasing level of ethnic diversity in them. That is, “colourful” as the title suggests. This paper addresses this phenomenon by briefly discussing the reasons for and possible implications of this trend from a social psychological perspective based on social identity theory along with race and media studies. With reference to previous research, it may be concluded that the increased level of racial diversity among actors may be due to the fact that the profit-oriented characteristics of the movie industry compels practitioners to take into account the socially and politically influential factors of minority groups. However, as the dominant narrative is still white-dominated, the roles played by minorities in films are often influenced by stereotypes or made for specific audience groups. On top of this, some minorities, such as Asians, are subject to wider prejudice. This is reflected not only in the films themselves and casting, but also in audience preferences.
Keywords
Movie, Race, Diversity, Social identity
[1]. Dalton M.M. Revising the Hollywood Curriculum. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. 2006, Dec;3(2):29-34.
[2]. Agosto V. Scripted Curriculum: What Movies Teach about Dis/ability and Black Males. Teachers College Record. 2014, Apr 1;116(4):1-24.
[3]. Nadaner D. Art and Cultural Understanding: The Role of Film in Education. Art Education. 1981, Jul;34(4):6.
[4]. Kabadayi L. The Role of Short Film in Education. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences. 2012, Jan 1;47:316-20.
[5]. Kontaş H. The Effect of an Education-Themed Movie on the Academic Motivation of Teacher Candidates and Their Attitude towards Teaching Profession. Journal of Education and Training Studies. 2016, Mar 22;4(6).
[6]. Nisbet, E. C., Myers, T. A. Cultivating tolerance of homosexuals. Living with television now: Advances in cultivation theory & research, 2012, pp.61-80.
[7]. Tukachinsky Forster R., Neuville C., Foucaut S., Morgan S., Poerschke A., Torres A. Media users as allies: personality predictors of dominant group members’ support for racial and sexual diversity in entertainment media. The Communication Review. 2022, Jan 2;25(1):54-79.
[8]. Weaver A.J, Frampton J.R. Crossing the color line: An examination of mediators and a social media intervention for racial bias in selective exposure to movies. Communication Monographs. 2019 Aug 5;86(4):399-415.
[9]. Renjith S. The Multicultural Mouse: a Critical Analysis of Race, Body, and Gender in Select Disney Movies. https://tjes.teresas.ac.in/. Teresian Journal of English Studies, 2022.
[10]. Roxborough S. America’s TV Exports Too Diverse for Overseas? The Hollywood Reporter, 2016. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/americas-tv-exports-diverse-overseas-879109/
[11]. Falconer R. Oscars details new diversity requirements for Best Picture nominees. Axios. 2020 https://www.axios.com/oscars-diversity-requirement-best-picture-nominee-1629d567-30a2-4807-beec-3bf5d43f52e5.html
[12]. Fowdur L., Kadiyali V., Prince J. Racial bias in expert quality assessment: A study of newspaper movie reviews. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 2012 Sep 1;84(1):292–307.
[13]. Weaver A.J. The Role of Actors’ Race in White Audiences’ Selective Exposure to Movies. Journal of Communication. 2011 Apr;61(2):369-85.
[14]. Grier S.A, Brumbaugh A.M, Thornton C.G. Crossover Dreams: Consumer Responses to Ethnic-Oriented Products. Journal of Marketing. 2006, Apr;70(2):35-51.
[15]. Hunter, L. P., Proffitt, J. M. Courting minority commodity audiences: Bounce TV in the age of media conglomeration. In Race and contention in twenty-first century US media, Routledge, 2016, pp. 26-40.
[16]. Firmansyah F.M., Jones J.J. Did the Black Panther Movie Make Blacks Blacker? Examining Black Racial Identity on Twitter Before and After the Black Panther Movie Release. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 2019, pp.66-78.
[17]. Hennig-Thurau T., Wiertz C., Feldhaus F. Does Twitter matter? The impact of microblogging word of mouth on consumers’ adoption of new movies. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. 2014, Jun 1;43(3):375-94.
[18]. Rima D., Makmun Fauzi. SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE UNDER RACIAL DISCRIMINATION OF DON SHIRLEY AS A BLACK AMERICAN IN PETER FARRELLY’S MOVIE, GREEN BOOK (2018). Journal Langue, 2018. http://jurnal.pertiwi.ac.id/index.php/langue/article/view/53
[19]. Cohen, J. Audience identification with media characters. In Psychology of entertainment. Routledge, 2013, pp. 183-197.
[20]. Abrams J.R., Giles H. Ethnic Identity Gratifications Selection and Avoidance by African Americans: A Group Vitality and Social Identity Gratifications Perspective. Media Psychology. 2007 Mar;9(1):115-34.
[21]. Aumer K., Blas D., Huston K., Mabuti C., Hsu N. Assessing Racial Preferences in Movies: The Impact of Mere-Exposure and Social Identity Theory. Psychology. 2017;08(09):1314-25.
[22]. Maykovich M.K. Stereotypes and Racial Images - White, Black and Yellow. Human Relations. 1972, Apr;25(2):101-20.
Cite this article
Wang,J. (2025). What Makes the Movie More "Colourful"? A Discussion on Diversity and Social Psychological Theories. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,78,101-106.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Social Psychology and Humanity Studies
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).