As the summer movies season gets underway, it will feature hits and duds. While most people will watch the top movies, others will actively seek out the flops. The list of bad quality movies infamously includes “The Room,” “Sharknado” and “Cocaine Bear.”
This phenomenon seems to run counter to intuitions about human decision-making.
“Human behavior is complicated. And even things that seem obvious, like people are going to choose the things that they think are better than the things they think are worse, are not always the case,” said Caleb Warren, a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona who studies a related phenomenon of ironic consumption. “We have all these different motives, these different goals, and sometimes these different goals are competing.”
The first controlled empirical study of why people may prefer something they deem to be worse than higher quality alternatives – and why we may find something “so bad it’s good” – was published in November in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
The research, which examined 12 different preregistered studies with 5,393 subjects, adds an interesting wrinkle to our understanding of how humans make decisions.
“It’s one of these findings that really resonates. It’s something that I think we’ve all experienced,” said Stephen Spiller, a professor of marketing and behavioral decision-making at UCLA Anderson School of Management who was not involved in the research.
Sometimes, people prefer the bad option
In the study’s first experiment, 385 participants were asked to choose one joke to read from several options based on a quality rating.
As expected, the participants most often preferred the best-rated option. But the second most popular choice was the worst-rated one. People were also more likely to choose the worst-rated joke compared with the mediocre ones in the middle.
This pattern has held in subsequent experiments in which participants had to choose between video clips from “So You Think You Can Dance,” karaoke performances and “American Idol” auditions. Regardless of the content, more people chose the worst performances than the middle options.
This preference for badness “is something that’s not just idiosyncratic to one particular thing. It’s something that you have to think about in multiple different content domains,” said Evan Weingarten, assistant professor of marketing at Arizona State University’s Carey School of Business and an author of the empirical study.
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To determine which features underlie something that people find “so bad it’s good,” the researchers presented 596 subjects with images of art of varying quality, drawing from online Reddit communities that featured good art (from r/art), mediocre art (from r/beginner_art) and very bad art (from r/delusionalartists – “people who believe themselves to be the next Picasso but truly do not have a talent,” Weingarten said.). The subjects were asked to rate the art based on humor, absurdity, aesthetics, utility and the quality of “so bad it’s good.”
Art that people found to be “so bad it’s good” was more likely to be funnier and more absurd, which appears to be key to its entertainment value. Results from another experiment suggest that this entertainment value is what drives people to seek out badness.
This finding fits with the benign violation theory of humour, developed in part by Warren, which says that violating expectations in a non-threatening way can be funny.
“When they’re not violating any of your goals, the very bad options can actually provide a source of amusement,” Weingarten said.
But when we have more utilitarian and practical goals, we are less likely to seek out those bad options.
“Like, you don’t want a so-bad-it’s-good vacuum cleaner. That wouldn’t make any sense,” Weingarten said.
In another experiment, the researchers randomly assigned 555 participants to select videos of karaoke bar performances based on either hedonic or utilitarian purposes. Participants who had utilitarian goals were less likely to choose the worst-rated option (21.8 percent) compared with those who were looking for amusement (33.6 percent). They were also more likely to choose the middle option.
Adding a cost also shifted preferences. In another experiment, participants who had to pay 25 cents per selection picked the worst option less often than those who could have it free.
Empathy for differences
The research opens the door for potential sequels exploring other facets of enjoying badness.
For example, the current research focuses on differences in quality, which economists and marketers call vertical differentiation in product comparisons. Bad here means that something is “failing its goals,” Weingarten said. It does not directly address matters of taste, or horizontal differentiation, where quality is arguably the same, such as comparing Coke to Pepsi.
Could high-quality products of questionable taste also be deemed so bad it’s good? Weingarten pointed to the subreddit r/ATBGE, short for “awful taste but great execution,” as a rich source of such examples. (Some posts include a keyboard made of keys that look like cheese, a knitted skin-coloured ski mask and a velvet Rolls-Royce.)
The research can also remind us to have empathy for some of our differences in opinion. What one person finds so bad it’s good, another may find, well, bad.
But we can have “some appreciation of the fact that different people choose different things for different reasons,” Spiller said. “And that’s okay.”