The following article contains some useful references for my purposes. It starts off with some seemingly unpromising research by psychologists into the phenomenon of our worship of celebrity but then becomes more grounded when it joins forces with what evolutionary biologists are saying about the importance of status and community.

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WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR

Think your daily dose of celebrity titttle-tattle is just a bit of fun? Think again. You'll never look at gossip columns the same way

Kate Dougles

Shock, horror! Hold the front page! A new disease is tearing through the western world. It seems that nobody is immune. You might not even know you are affected, and as the experts struggle to understand who is at risk there seems little hope of stopping the spread.

OK, that's a tad over the top, but according to a recent survey of more than 600 people, around one-third of us suffer from CWS, otherwise known as Celebrity Worship Syndrome. You may think taking an interest in the antics of the rich and famous is a bit of harmless fun, but you couldn't be more wrong.

Psychologists are starting to suspect that worshipping celebrities is the top of a slippery slope that leads to depression, anxiety and psychosis. If you can't keep your nose out of Vanity Fair or Hello! magazine, you could already be headed for big trouble. Perhaps you are having an identity crisis or are in search of a secular god. Or maybe you have become so alienated from the real world that you find it easier to form imaginary relationships with celebs than with normal people.

But before you unplug your TV and swear off newspapers forever, it's worth knowing that this is just one side of the story. Evolutionary biologists, too, are waking up to celebrity worship, and the conclusions they are reaching are very different. To them, the key is history, or more precisely human evolutionary history -- because in evolutionary terms our obsession with celebrities makes perfect sense. Far from being a form of madness, paying special attention to successful individuals is among the cleverest things our big-brained species does.

Celebrity worshippers rarely get a good press. They are portrayed either as impressionable and harmless fools or as obsessed and dangerous stalkers who will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to gain the attention of their idols. Until recently most psychologists who had looked at celebrity worship accepted this fan/stalker dichotomy. But that was before Lynn McCutcheon from DeVry University in Orlando, Florida, and fellow psychologist James Houran from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield devised the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS).

Houran describes the scale as a sort of thermometer designed to take the temperature of people's interest in the stars. It works by getting volunteers to rate a series of statements, such as "I am obsessed by details of my favourite celebrity's life", "I consider my favourite celebrity to be my soul mate" and "If he/she asked me to do something illegal as a favour, I would probably do it". It sounds simple, but the psychologists say it has transformed their understanding of celebrity worship. In particular it has broken down the fan/stalker dichotomy to reveal the psychotic nutcase lurking in all of us.

"The scale tells us that celebrity worshippers are not two separate groups of people," says Houran. "People fall along a continuum." Celebrity worship, in other words, is not either pathological or non-pathological. Instead there is a sliding scale that can be roughly divided into three different stages defined by the behaviour and attitude of worshippers. At the entry level you find people who follow celebs for "entertainment-social" reasons. If you are burning to know every detail about your favourite celeb, such as why Forbes magazine rates Jennifer Aniston as the most powerful star in the world this year, or which Madrid mansion Posh and Becks will buy, you could be among the one in five people who fall into this category.

Harmless, you might think -- but you are already more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and social dysfunction than a non-worshipper. What's more, your interest is now in danger of escalating into an unhealthy obsession. The next stage is developing "intense-personal" attitudes towards an idol, such as the belief that you have a special bond with your adored star. The CAS suggests that 10 per cent of people are at this level, where celebrity worship is becoming an addiction.

Finally, at its most intense, celebrity worship is " borderline-pathological" -- a condition found in around 1 per cent of people. These include stalkers and people who are prepared to harm themselves or others in the name of their idol.

"Just worshipping a celebrity does not make you dysfunctional," says Houran. "But it does put you at risk of being so. There is this progression of behaviours, and if you start, we don't know what's going to stop you." Worse still, Houran's work as a clinician has convinced him that asking people to rate their own attitudes to celebrities results in an underestimate of the numbers suffering from CWS, particularly in its severe forms. Also, although there have been no studies to try to discover whether CWS is on the increase, the psychologists, especially McCutcheon, are convinced that it is.

The obvious question then is why do people get sucked into the fantasy world of celebrity in the first place? Houran and McCutcheon suspect that an interest in celebs may start with the search for an "identity" and a "sense of fulfilment". Worshippers then get so absorbed in the details of the lives of their idols that they start to feel emotional attachment, and this can lead to a pathological interest. Houran and McCutcheon have dubbed this the "absorption-addiction" model. What the model predicts is that people should tend to get interested in celebrities at times when they are looking for direction in life -- such as during their teenage years -- with this absorption progressing to addiction if they experience a crisis such as the loss of a loved one. But it's not as simple as that. The latest research suggests that some people are more likely to get addicted than others.

Earlier this year Houran, McCutcheon and psychologist John Maltby from the University of Leicester in the UK revealed a link between different personality types and the three increasingly extreme sets of attitudes and behaviours towards the stars {The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol 191, p 25). People who worship celebs for entertainment or social reasons tend to be extroverts -- sociable, lively, active and adventurous. Intense and personal interest in the stars is associated with neurotic, tense, emotional and moody characters. And borderline-pathological attitudes correlate with psychotic traits such as impulsive, antisocial and egocentric behaviour. "Type of celebrity worship reflects personality traits," says Maltby. Still, it is unclear whether this is cause or effect -- after all, the psychologists know that people can move from one state to the next. "We don't really know why people become obsessed," admits McCutcheon.

The absorption-addiction model is a broad-brush theory with instinctive appeal, but painting in the details is proving tricky. For example, why seek identity and fulfilment in someone you will probably never meet? One potential answer is that in our fragmented modern world, many people lack a sense of family and community, and find it easier to form imaginary relationships rather than real ones. Celebrity worship as a kind of cry for help from the shy and isolated seems plausible. The only trouble is that when McCutcheon and Diane Ashe from Valencia Community College in Orlando went in search of the link, they couldn't find one. "It looks as though there's a very weak relationship between loneliness and celebrity worship," says McCutcheon.

If not social fragmentation, then perhaps another aspect of modern society is to blame. Could celebrity worship be the new religion? Are J-Lo, Brad, Madonna and all the rest acting as gods in a secular world? Maltby is intrigued by this question, but has so far been unable to find an answer. Last year, he, McCutcheon, Houran and Ashe tested over 300 British people to see whether there was any connection between religiosity -- or the lack of it -- and celebrity worship {Personality and Individual Differences, vol 32, p 1157). They found that non-believers were slightly more interested in celebrities, but the difference was not significant. "Many religious people apparently ignore the religious teaching that 'thou shalt worship no other god', or fail to connect it to the 'worship' of celebrities," they conclude.

So celebrity worshippers are not necessarily sad, lonely, or in need of spiritual sustenance. Can psychologists say anything about who is most likely to suffer from CWS? Even that is proving tricky. CWS affects people of all ages and both sexes. There is no strong link with intelligence or stupidity. And while you might expect that cynical, manipulative types would be immune, that's not so. McCutcheon reported this year that people with Machiavellian tendencies are just as prone to CWS as the rest of us {Current Research in Social Psychology, vol 8, p 131). The same study did, however, reveal an intriguing risk factor celebrity worshippers are more likely to believe that the world is fair and just. "Belief that the world is a fair place implies an acceptance of one's culture, and part of that culture is the notion of heaping a lot of adulation on celebrities," says McCutcheon.

It's not much to go on, but this "just world" connection could be the key to understanding our interest in the rich and famous. While McCutcheon and co have been measuring people's attitudes to celebrity, in another part of the academic woods, a group of evolutionary biologists has been thinking about the same problem from a very different perspective. They are interested in the quality we call "prestige" -- what it is, why some people have it, and what makes them so attractive. Could there be a link with celebrity worship?

Ideas about prestige centre on copying. Humans are born to imitate, and our success as a species is largely down to this talent, because it has allowed us to adapt to changing environments much faster than is possible through biological evolution alone. What sets us apart from other animals is our attention to detail. A chimp can watch another chimp fishing for termites and then copy the basic idea, but only humans can copy the exact details of a successful technique. As a result, it pays for us to be picky about who we copy.

"It makes sense for you to rank individuals according to how successful they are at the behaviours you are trying to copy, because whoever is getting more of what everybody wants is probably using above-average methods," says evolutionary anthropologist Francisco Gil-White from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This ranking behaviour is what confers prestige.

Prestige is unique to humans, says Gil-White, who recently published a paper on the subject together with Joe Henrich from Emory University in Atlanta {Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 22, p 165). Other animals may have dominant individuals who acquire status by force, but we seem to be the only ones who freely confer status on the grounds of perceived merit.

In the ancestral environment, prestigious individuals would have included successful hunters and elders, but these days we no longer need to hunt, and longevity doesn't necessarily indicate fitness. However, we still possess a psychological mechanism telling us that people who get a lot of attention are worth copying, Gil-White explains, and celebrities fit the bill. In short, fame and fortune are good indicators of competence.

But there is a problem with using successful individuals as role models. "Unless you understand the causal connection between a certain trait and success, you can't easily decide which traits you should imitate," says evolutionary biologist Rob Boyd from the University of California, Los Angeles. He reckons the way worshippers get around this is "general copying", which means finding out as much as you can about your role model and then trying to emulate everything. To do that, you need to get up close and personal. "Imitation is an activity that benefits from the cooperation of the model," Gil-White points out. "So copiers were selected by evolution to kiss up to their chosen model." This could explain our insatiable interest in celebrities and our deference to them.

Not all evolutionary biologists agree. Robin Dunbar from the University of Liverpool in the UK is not so taken with the idea of celebrities as role models. "We're fascinated even when we don't go out of our way to copy them," he counters. But he does believe there is an evolutionary explanation for celebrity worship. He suspects it is to do with monitoring freeloaders -- ensuring that people don't enjoy the benefits of society without paying their dues. Society invests a lot in celebrities, so we should constantly monitor them to make sure they are not exploiting us. "Gossip is a reputation management thing," says Dunbar, who has also famously described it as a form of social grooming.

And there are yet other ideas. Peter Todd from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Geoffrey Miller from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque point out that there is also a sexual element to celebrity worship. An interest in people with high mate value makes evolutionary sense if they are available, says Miller. And the modern media can give people the illusion that they are in the potential mating pool of celebrities.

If the evolutionary biologists are correct, our interest in celebrities is innate -- it arises from instincts that evolved to promote our survival. And it seems that, far from being a modern disease, the cult of celebrity goes back a long way. The psychologists certainly seem persuaded. "It makes a lot of sense," says McCutcheon. "We ought to steal that idea."

But are the psychologists right too -- has the world changed so much that our innate drive to worship celebrities has become harmful? Perhaps. "The ever-increasing realism of electronic media means that people get duped into thinking that they are having a relationship with a celebrity," says Miller. "Which, of course, is precisely what the celebrity's agents and marketing representatives want you to think." And there is evidence that fantasy relationships can damage real relationships.

Stalking, too, seems to be a very modern phenomenon. Gil-White points out that in primitive societies copiers could get physically close to prestige figures, but celebrities are not physically accessible, and stalkers may be rebelling against that.

So is an interest in celebrities a slippery slope to misery and madness, or is it just a normal part of being human that may even help us live more successful lives? Boyd points out that evolved instincts can still be beneficial even when they are working in an environment that is very different from the ancestral one. "Celebrity worship in today's environment no longer fulfils its original function," adds Gil-White. "But I don't think it is a bad thing. Some celebrities are positive role models. And fawning over stars gives great pleasure.

"Perhaps we just have to accept that, as with all of life's pleasures, there is the danger of going too far. We would never dream of giving up eating, sex or even generosity, just because there is a danger we might become hooked on the high they give us. Moderation is the key. So, if you are a closet admirer of Stephen Hawking or Craig Venter -- or, be honest, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, George Clooney or Cameron Diaz -- you can come out and be proud. You never know, you might learn something useful.

New Scientist 16 August 2003

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