Why do people prefer certain fictional stories over others? Personality traits capture stable individual differences in motivational sensitivities: Openness reflects exploration, Neuroticism reflects threat-reactivity, and so on. If so, these traits should systematically predict preferences for narrative features that engage the corresponding motivational systems. We test this hypothesis across three preregistered studies. In Study 1, we directly measured individual preferences for motivationally salient narrative features in a cross-cultural survey of 9,201 participants from 23 countries. Personality traits predicted preferences and the overall pattern replicated in 22 of 23 countries. In Study 2, we confirmed these predictions using ecologically valid data from 574 movies, annotated by large language models for the same narrative features and linked to the Big Five profiles of 3.5 million Facebook users. The predicted associations replicated at the population level. In Study 3, we tested a complementary structural prediction: if story preferences reflect an underlying motivational architecture, then the co-occurrence structure of narrative features in stories should mirror the co-preference structure across individuals. Using Mantel tests, we found strong structural correspondence, replicated across all 23 countries. Together, these findings support a model in which story preferences arise from universal motivational systems whose sensitivities vary across individuals.
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