Does a BIG Star Sway Movie Critics or Just Self Proclaimed Movie Connoisseurs?

In today’s day and age, people can find out so much about a movie within a few clicks before even seeing it. From a simple trailer to an entire script of a movie to, all of the spoilers are on the world wide web. The in between information though, are the scores that movie critiques give a movie before it is released.
The score is not based off of how prominent the actors in the movie are, but different layers to the movie, such as plot, themes, tones, directing, pace, and cinematography. But that leaves us wondering: do movies with movie stars score better than movies without?
A study by Lindner, Lidquist, and Arnold (2015), collected data on different movies and their meta critic scores based on various different factors, two of the factors being movie star and no star.

In Figure 1, we can see that the purple box plot representing movies without a star have a wider range of scores, the top score being close to 100 and the lowest score just below 10. The orange plot that represents movies with a star do not have the same range as the other plot, the highest score about 10 below the top score for a no star movie, but the lowest score quite above. In the end though, the median scores are almost exactly the same. Leaving us with the answer: no, based on the meta critic scores, having no star or a star in the movie does not have a great impact on the score of the movie.
So now that we know critics are not swayed by a big star, maybe we should take a survey with self proclaimed movie connoisseurs and see how the results differ?