Immerse or escape reality? The paradoxical effect of realism authenticity on audience evaluation

One interpretation of authenticity is that it always seems to be associated with “genuineness,” “reality,” and “truth”. This definition implies three related assumptions: an entity must verify its connection to a referent in reality, proximity to the referent determines the degree and value of authenticity, and authenticity is a quality inherent to the entity. However, these assumptions face challenges in the digital age; the perception and evaluation of authenticity have shifted away from verification of the source of authenticity towards experiencing authenticity as a process. To this end, we propose a new concept, “realism authenticity,” and argue that a moderate level of realism authenticity can result in the highest audience’s evaluation because it enables an entity to present an extractive reality that is not only credible but also omits tedious and horrid details of the real world. Drawing on over 1 million online reviews from the Chinese film market from 2002 to 2022 and a state-of-art natural language processing model, BERT, we find a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped relationship between realism authenticity and audience evaluation on film. We further demonstrate that the influence of realism authenticity can be moderated by the inherent attributes of the entity’s category.