Everyone knows someone who can recite an actress’s entire filmography, analyze a singer’s smallest stories, or argue for hours about the latest celebrity breakup. This passion often raises a slightly spicy question: does being obsessed with celebrities make you less intelligent, or does it reveal something specific about the way we think?
A study published in 2021 in the journal BMC Psychology, conducted with 1,763 Hungarian adults, provides some answers. It highlights a weak but real link between obsession with celebrities and slightly lower scores on cognitive ability tests. Most notably, it describes the brain’s astonishing ability to focus almost entirely on one public figure.
Obsessions with celebrities and intelligence:
For almost twenty years, several studies have explored the relationship between celebrity worship and intellectual performance, with very variable results. Some studies mentioned a slight decrease in cognitive scores among the most extreme fans, while others found nothing significant. The Hungarian team wanted to clarify this link by relying on Raymond Cattell’s two-factor theory of intelligence, which distinguishes between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.
The researchers recruited adults from the general population for an online survey. Each participant took a vocabulary test reflecting crystallized intelligence (acquired knowledge and culture) and a symbols and numbers test measuring fluid intelligence (processing speed, mental flexibility). They also completed the Celebrity Attitude Scale, assessing the degree of obsession with celebrities, Rosenberg’s self-esteem scale, and provided information on their education level, income, and perceived material situation.
Cognitive abilities according to the level of worship:
To describe the relationship to celebrities, the authors distinguish three levels. The first, called “social entertainment,” concerns people who are interested in stars mainly for the pleasure of talking about them with their loved ones. The next level, “intense-personal,” refers to a strong emotional attachment, with the feeling of knowing the celebrity intimately. Finally, the “borderline pathological” level describes fans ready to do almost anything if their idol asked.
As scores in these three levels increase, cognitive test performances decrease slightly. Even when considering age, gender, education level, income, perceived wealth, and self-esteem, the obsession with celebrities remains associated with slightly lower scores. However, the effect is modest: the combination of education level, income, and celebrity worship explains less than 5% of the variation in performance. The researchers also emphasize that this is a correlation, with no evidence that being an obsessive fan lowers intelligence, or vice versa.
A quality not to neglect:
To interpret these results, the authors propose an interesting hypothesis: excessive behaviors like celebrity worship require a massive investment in attention and mental energy. Maintaining what they describe as a “unilateral emotional bond” with a celebrity mobilizes memory, imagination, and daily monitoring of that person’s news. This ability to hyper-focus on a single public figure is precisely the remarkable quality observed.
Highly invested fans remember dates, outfits, interview quotes, analyze details that others don’t even notice. Their brain works a bit like a projector focused on a single subject. The authors note that this hyper-focus, when it becomes extreme, may leave fewer resources available for other cognitive tasks, hence the slightly lower scores on tests. They also add that people with higher cognitive abilities are more likely to recognize the “marketing strategies” surrounding celebrities, which would lead them to maintain more critical distance.
