Nonreligious people tend to be more interested in celebrity culture. For them, celebrity fills some of the same roles the church fills for believers, like the desire to admire the powerful and the drive to fit into a community of people with shared values.

When our brains evolved, anybody with a familiar face was an "in-group" member, a person whose alliances and enmities were important to keep track of. Things have changed somewhat since life in the Pleistocene era, but our neural hardwiring hasn’t, so on some deeper level, we may think NBC's Friends really are our friends. The brain simply doesn't realize that it's being fooled by TV and movies, says sociologist Satoshi Kanazawa, lecturer at the London School of Economics. "Hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was impossible for someone not to know you if you knew them. And if they didn’t kill you, they were probably your friend." Kanazawa’s research has shown that this feeling of friendship has other repercussions: People who watch more TV are more satisfied with their friendships, just as if they had more friends and socialized more frequently. Another study found that teens who keep up to date on celebrity gossip are popular, with strong social networks—the interest in pop culture indicates a healthy drive for independence from parents.

...models are less compelling objects of fascination than actresses or pop stars. They're beautiful, but they’re enigmatic: We rarely get any sense of their personalities.

Labels: allyson, celebrities