Are negative reviews biased?

There's some science showing that a negativity bias is hardwired into us, so lately, I tend to take negative views with a grain of salt, unless they provide intelligent criticism. Mindless negativity can be entertaining, but I don't think it's particularly intelligent.

Mindless anything is pretty much garbage, negative or positive. Not sure what point you are trying to make, but I don't think it is particularly cogent?

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Not sure, I find that negative reviews tend to focus on one thing they dislike (e.x. the CGI Dwarves in Snow White) rather than the whole film. And that people tend to hone in more on negativity than they do on positivity.

I guess you could find examples of mindless positivity or "gushing", but I personally don't see that as often.

It's true that people tend to focus on the negative traits of a thing strongly even if 90 percent of the thing is positive. It's the whole fly in the ointment thing. In the case of the Snow White remake, I think the cool reception has far more reasons than just the CGI. If that was the film's only issue, then few people would continue to shell out big money for the one millionth Marvel thing. When you have a remake that spits on and mocks the themes and archetypes of the beloved original and have a staring actress who goes around bashing the canonical and cherished original film, arguably Disney's most prolific, important, and foundational property... yeah that's a bad look and who'd want to support that?

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I think the best option is to find a few sources you trust and stick with those. Like a certain reviewer or podcaster or something. If you know the kinds of movies that person likes and maybe find you have the same tastes, then those reviews will mean more.

At the same time I find number scores to be useless...giving a movie a "7" doesn't mean anything unless I know why. Sometimes you'll read the reasons and find them very silly. Or, worse, you'll realize the reviewer brings in outside politics or some other bizarre reasoning for down-rating a movie.

I find it's best to just find a few trusted reviewers or podcasters who you often seem to agree with and just focus on their reviews. When you find your opinions often align with that person, then the review means more. I don't get much from random users slapping number scores onto stuff, especially when you read the review and found they nailed it for flimsy or political reasons.

I guess you could find examples of mindless positivity or "gushing", but I personally don't see that as often.

Yes, but if a movie is really good, then a review is going to be gushing. I don't get how this is a bad thing.

One of the signs of our polarised times is that people tend to review based on how much the movie reflects their political or social views. It happens for both negative and positive reviews but the negative reviews tend to be more heated than the positive ones.

That's very true. I know it's much funner for me to write a scathing negative movie review than it is to write a glowingly positive one. The hardest review to write for me is when I feel mediocre about a movie...It's much more fun to bitch about something you hate in a movie.

That's true too. But we can't go to far into that as we have a no political rule here so I can't elaborate.

Negative reviews from folks who have actually watched the movie are one thing.

But review bombing is very widespread now, and it seems to be getting worse with the movies that get hate for reasons having nothing to do with the actual artistic merits of the movie.

Of course they are biased. If I put on my one-time pro statistician hat, I have issues with the idea that "everybody is above average" or that All TV Sucks. That seems to be the philosophy for movie reviewers, like on a 0 - 10 scale, every movie is above 6. We have 1-5 star scales, 1-5 popcorn scales, but rarely is anything a 1, much less a zero. It's exacerbated by the fact that, when I see a movie, I check comments and reviews first and do NOT see what looks to me to be the bad ones. It's been years since I saw an Adam Sandler comedy and that's not an accident. I'm paying for tickets and I just don't need that, so, the best Sandler movie is a 1 and that's only because the projector didn't catch fire and force an evacuation.

Since there's no good science in ANY of this, we might as well do what we've been doing for a long time, which is to pick reviewers who seem to mirror our own opinion and just go with that. Certain people here seem to mirror my taste, so I check their comments first.

Objectivity is just a comforting illusion. For me, at least, seeing a new movie in a theater especially, is a night out with some food and drink. Somebody will have to be paying me before I start seeing and reviewing movies that do NOT look like I'd like them.

SOURCE?

As Holden Pike said, by the same token, vacuous ass-kissery and zombie-esque "I APPROVE OF CURRENT THING" commentary really doesn't add anything either.

You could say it's about as broadly unhelpful and insubstantive as saying "People are naturally negative, therefor we should be skeptical of negative reviews."

How about you drop the shallow heuristic and operate under the assumption that any given review IS unintelligent and insubstantive until it demonstrates otherwise? As opposed to ascribing positive reviews the benefit of the doubt and negative reviews an alleged "bias"?

Just my incredibly negative opinion.

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"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel

Some interesting articles that agree with that premise.
What Is the Negativity Bias?

Our Brain's Negative Bias

Understanding Negativity Bias: Why Your Brain is Hardwired for Negative Thoughts

Is that an objectively true claim?

Yeah.....maybe. But then, that's just MY opinion.

If so, then it also appears to be objectively true that.

1. You exist, objectively.
2. Opinions exist, objectively.
3. There is a particular content belonging to set of "skizzerflake" and also the set of "opinion" which exists objectively.

If so, however, that particular opinion must be wrong, at least as an absolute. If so, this raises the tantalizing prospect that we might speak confidently of some objectivity in the world.

Actually, if you define "objectivity" as devoid of personal preference, emotional attachment, and see it as a uncontaminated, carefully measured view of Truth, I'd argue that it doesn't even exist for humans.

In regard to movies, we might approach it with some strictly defined criteria but since anything pertaining to art needs to appeal to emotions and preferences, the truly objective person would probably only be able to vouch for something like an instructional video on something dry like how to fix a broken blender, with a cast listing and a run time.

My personal example, in the movie world, would be westerns. I don't like them, I got burned out as a kid and have no interest in seeing another one. Ergo, any review I'd post about a the best western ever made would be contaminated by my aversion to them.....sucks, just horses, saloons and guns.

We're all somewhere on that continuum for movies, a rank order of preferences, perceptions of characters, tired plot lines, genres, etc. Yours are probably different from mine. Objectivity is a myth beyond the most basic of measurements.

Fortunately, it need not be "devoid" of sentiment in terms of it's actual endorsement. The content of the claim itself is not "contaminated" by the sentiment which motivates it's endorsement. Rather, we are motivated, in part, to endorse true claims and the basis of sentiment (e.g., our gooey desire to state true claims). Although the philosopher is, etymologically, a "lover of wisdom," this does not mean that the content of wisdom (i.e., the objective status of a true claim, the philos) depends on our love (sophia) of it.

There is no more escape from objectivity. Language is assertoric. It states how the world is. The content of the assertion doesn't matter. What matters is operation of subject, predicate and copula, basic grammatical structure which assert that the "this is that" / "X is Y." Our beliefs which underwrite our assertions also reflect our incorrigible faith in objectivity. You, for example, seem to "really believe" that it is objectively true that no claim is objectively true. That's fine, but your believing it is attached to your sincere attachment to a world picture which is "true" regardless of whether we believe it or not.

The great paradox of language is that, in motion, it is always simultaneously objective and subjective. Language is assertoric (it purports to tell us "how it is"). Language is also sermonic (we use it to try to get other people to see the world the way we do, to align our subjective endorsement or rejection of a claim - "Hurrah!" or "Boo!" - into intersubjective overlap).

That stated, I think you might apply considerable pressure to the idea that the narrow activity of film criticism can be objective in the way that a mathematical or scientific proof can be objective. I think you probably have me on the ropes there (i.e., the rest of your post). Aesthetic relativism, however, can be consistently maintained. Cognitive relativism tips over the whole apple cart.

I would argue that it's slippery. I can be fairly "objective" when I use an agreed upon ruler to measure the length of an object, or tell who was the US president in 1923, but anything about history, especially interpretations of it, as a professor once put it, "depends whose ox is being gored". We can probably agree that Calvin Coolidge was president in 1923, but was he a good president? Drama, biography, politics especially, just keep making the slope get slipperier. Even when honorable people try to tell a story, devoid of opinions and attitudes, some of that always creeps in, even over something like the choice of events that get narrated.

No doubt about that.
We should have a care to segregate epistemology and ontology. Ontologically, whatever happened is what "happened to happen." We might argue as to whether the ontological situation of the universe (i.e., what happened) is subjective, but this tumbles us headlong into an abyss of incoherence, because contradictions become actual. If I believe the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, then it was in 1066. If another believes that it occurred one million years prior, then it did.

Epistemically, our difficulties do not involve "overwriting reality" by remaking it, rather epistemics speak to our poor illumination of it. There is either small tea pot orbiting Mars or there is not. Tea pots are very small and Mars is quite far away, so we cannot say with 100% certainty that there is not such an object. History is incomplete. Witnesses are partial. Records are destroyed. Transcribers err. Reigning orthodoxies bully heterodox views. That stated, we are still left with world about which we might be right or wrong (or of which we may have a "better" or "worse" understanding). Objectivity still exists on this view, it is just that our understanding is not perfectly objective.
Our epistemic gradations of

the conceptual (certainty),
the scientific (high confidence in many cases),
the political and moral (low confidence, but marked by some deep value commitments),
the aesthetic (low confidence, but informed by enduring patterns of human preference, intersubjective standards) and
the appetitive (purely subjective)

offer us continuum of confidence available in a subject matter. And we should note that our subject matter is usually composite / overlapping (i.e., there are scientific claims which can be made describing a "film").

Some footholds are sturdier than others, but the only relevant question is "can we still climb"? If we insist on absolute safety before our ascent we will never even summit a local hill. If we throw caution to the wind, on the other hand, we are likely to find more brightly colored corpses littering Mt. Everest. Thus, there is always a discussion to be had about what we can expect to pull off. I maintain, however, that the objection that "nothing is objective" leaves us forever trapped at the bottom.

Also, there are degrees of confidence that vary between modes of thought. Description is more secure than interpretation. Interpretation is more objective than evaluation. Mild evaluation is easier to presumptively demonstrate than strong evaluation (e.g., "the best film ever!!!").

Some of us climb an easier path. Some of us seek lower peaks. Some us us climb without safety gear. Some climb solo. I agree that in the realm of aesthetics, there are countless free-climbers who have failed spectacularly, falling off the cliff face (the upside is, that most of us survive the impact of failing in an aesthetic free-climb of Bergman).

In aesthetics, our discussions often seem almost hopeless. And yet here we are.