If you want to win an Oscar it is best to be an American actor in a movie that portrays American culture. That is the conclusion of a paper by an international team of psychology researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, the University of Exeter in UK, the University of Queensland and Macquarie University in Australia.
Mark Rylance, Brie Larson, Leonardo Dicaprio, Alicia Vikander at the 88th Oscars. Image credit: ABC Television Group / CC BY-ND 2.0.
The team, headed by University of Queensland researcher Niklas Steffens, analyzed the award of merit prizes for Best Actor and Actress in a Leading Role for the international award of US-based Oscars and British-based BAFTAs since BAFTA’s inception of this category in 1968.
This covered a total of 908 participants, comprising 97 winners and 383 (unsuccessful) nominees for the Oscars and 97 winners and 331 (unsuccessful) nominees for the BAFTAs.
Both awards state that they aim to recognize best performances in movies from all over the world.
The results show that US actors dominated the awards, winning more than 50% of all prizes across Oscars and BAFTAs.
Nevertheless, actors were more likely to win if they shared social group membership with the judges.
This meant that American actors won 52% of all BAFTAs but 69% of all Oscars, while British actors won 18% of all Oscars but 34% of all BAFTAs.
“We know a lot about the factors that increase people’s capacity to show exceptional performances,” Dr. Steffens said.
“However, a somewhat different question is what makes a given creative performance likely to be seen as exceptional. This was the question we addressed in this research.”
“These results show that whether we see a given performance as extraordinary is not just a function of the objective quality of that performance.”
“For perceivers are much more likely to recognize a performance as truly brilliant when perceivers and performers share membership in a social group.”
The data also showed that nationality made a difference to actually winning an award.
For the Oscars, American actors received 67% of all nominations but 78% of all awards.
The same held true for the BAFTAs, where British actors won 31% of all nominations but 42% of all awards.
Another important determinant of success was the subject matter of the movie.
In the Oscars, American artists accounted for 26% of award winners whose performance was in movies about non-US culture but for 88% of award winners whose performance was in movies about American culture.
“There is a widespread belief that our perception of makes a creation original and outstanding is given by its objective qualities, but in fact it is heavily influenced by the social groups we are members of, and which provide the basis for making sense of the world,” Dr. Steffens said.
The team’s findings were published online February 5 in the British Journal of Psychology.
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Niklas K. Steffens et al. Genius begins at home: Shared social identity enhances the recognition of creative performance. British Journal of Psychology, published online February 5, 2017; doi: 10.1111/bjop.12242
This article is based on a press-release from the British Psychological Society.
