When it comes to entertainment options, especially TV and movies, we sometimes intentionally choose things that we expect will be terrible.
This goes against typical consumer behavior. We don't go for shoddy appliances or shoddy household goods, and we don't vie for reservations with terrible restaurant reviews. But with the right mix of creepy dialogue, unexpected twists and cheap special effects, it seems hard to resist the widely criticized film. In fact, we may prefer to see spectacular failures rather than mediocre alternatives that are “better” in most ways.
There's a term for this phenomenon, “so bad it's good,” and a new research paper explores it in more detail.
This paper focuses on films that are very bad, such as the 2003 film “The Room,” which is considered one of the worst films of all time, and the 2011 music video for Rebecca Black's song “Friday,” which drew more viewers. , but starts with a good sensation example. She has over 100 million views on YouTube.
Amit Bhattacharjee, associate professor of marketing at Leeds School of Management and co-author of a research paper published in November 2023, said: “In the case of entertainment, the worst option available is that people don't want to try it.'' It has a charm that makes you want to see it.” Journal of Consumer Psychology.
The study, led by Evan Weingarten of Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business and co-authored by Patti Williams of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, sought to understand this “preference for evil.” Mr. Bhattacharjee said.
Enjoy right away with minimal investment
Researchers have demonstrated that the attractiveness of choosing a worse option over a better option depends on the costs involved. It's hard to justify spending money on a low-quality product with little functional value, so if you value a product's usefulness or you need it to accomplish a specific task, you may want to consider a high-quality product. Select a quality option.
This helps explain why consumers are drawn to malicious things in entertainment contexts. Consumers value immediate pleasure over utility when making these choices, and the investment required is minimal compared to other purchases.
According to Bhattacharjee, if you choose to consume movies, video clips, songs, and memes that are expected to be bad, you are primarily just sacrificing your time. We tend to think of how we spend time and how we spend money as different things, so it's true that it's relatively cheap to watch crap that doesn't enrich you intellectually or is of any use. “I feel like it doesn’t take,” he said.
The researchers concluded that one of the main reasons consumers are drawn to terrible options is the degree and nature of the entertainment value they provide. “The worst option has some qualities and virtues that the best option doesn't have,” Bhattacharjee said. “The worst things are likely to be funny, absurd, and ridiculous.”
What on earth is wrong with it?
This study is the first to provide controlled empirical evidence that consumers choose an option because they themselves expect it to be bad. That is, these are not examples of consumers choosing options that they believe are of high quality, but that most other consumers believe to be of low quality. Nevertheless, what is considered “bad” is still highly subjective and varies widely.
For example, the “Sharknado” series is often cited as an example of “so bad it's good” content, with Rotten Tomatoes calling it “proudly, shamelessly, and gloriously smart.” Most of his Redditors who enjoy these movies agree, but some characterize them as good works, or at least “overrated.” 2023's “Cocaine Bear” and this year's superhero film “Madame Web” have sparked similar online debates, with some critics saying they have earned “SBIG” status. others labeled it mediocre or simply “boring.”
To study these preferences with a blank slate free of participants' prior knowledge or associations, the researchers tested jokes, karaoke performances, auditions for the TV show “So You Think You Can Dance,” and posted on Reddit. Submitted art. In each category, participants were asked to choose what to take from among options grouped by external quality ratings ranging from very high to very low (e.g., previously Average quality rating from viewers of 9 choices from 1 star to 9 stars).
Our first experiment investigating joke choices found that, unsurprisingly, most participants preferred the highest-rated joke available. However, the lowest rated jokes were consistently chosen over higher rated mediocre jokes. Other experiments yielded similar results, with the same selection patterns consistently emerging across different types of content and presentation formats.
Bhattacharjee suggested that this study could be a starting point for exploring the “dimension of evil” as described in the paper. For example, comparing the attractiveness of badness due to poor quality execution to the attractiveness of badness due to good execution due to poor service may provide additional insight.
There also remain unanswered questions about other psychological and social factors that contribute to this phenomenon. “There are many potentially interesting reasons why people choose things that grossly violate their taste standards,” Bhattacharjee says.
A broader “fascination with failure” is evident not only in everyday life, but also in politics and celebrity culture, he added. Making fun of social blunders may make people feel better about themselves or simply enjoy participating in a viral trend. And antifandom can create a sense of community, as evidenced by the popularity of subreddits like r/ATBGE: Awful Taste But Great Execution and the enduring cult following surrounding movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. , we can provide you with a safe place to have fun. Stupidity.
There is a status aspect to declaring something “so bad it's good” because praising entertainment that grossly violates quality standards requires sufficient expertise to understand those standards. Mr. Bhattacharjee pointed out that there are also.
“This is another way to tell other people that you know what's good, because it's the opposite,” he says. At the same time, it suggests a lack of blind loyalty to social consensus, which is an attractive quality in itself. Enjoying the bad may be another route to the pursuit of the socially good, and may underlie a variety of seemingly inexplicable cultural phenomena.