Everyone knows someone who can recite an actress’s complete filmography, analyze a singer’s every story, or debate 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 our way of thinking?
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. It also describes the astonishing ability of the brain to focus almost entirely on a single public figure.
Obsessions with celebrities and intelligence
For almost twenty years, several studies have explored the link between celebrity worship and intellectual performance, with very variable results. Some research already 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.
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). Participants also completed the Celebrity Attitude Scale, assessing the degree of obsession with celebrities, Rosenberg’s self-esteem scale, and provided information on their level of education, income, and perception of their material situation.
Cognitive abilities according to the level of worship
To describe the relationship with celebrities, the authors distinguish three levels. The first, called “social entertainment,” involves 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 intimately knowing the celebrity. Finally, the “borderline pathological” level describes fans ready to do almost anything if their idol asked.
As scores at these three levels increase, cognitive test performance slightly decreases. Even taking into account age, gender, education level, income, perceived wealth, and self-esteem, obsession with celebrities remains associated with slightly lower scores. The effect is modest: the combination of education level, income, and celebrity worship explains less than 5% of the performance variation. Furthermore, the researchers emphasize that this is a correlation, with no evidence that being an obsessive fan lowers intelligence, or vice versa.
A quality not to overlook
To interpret these results, the authors propose an interesting hypothesis: excessive behaviors like idol worship require a massive investment in attention and mental energy. Sustaining 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 devoted fans remember dates, outfits, interview lines, analyze details that others don’t even notice. Their brain works a bit like a projector focused on a single subject. The authors point out that this hyper-focus, when it becomes extreme, can 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 push them to maintain more critical distance.
