One Evolutionary Explanation of the attraction of celebs is through the attraction to creative individuals. This says that in our EEA a female would have looked for a mate who showed the most creative displays of behaviour, this has adapted to the present day and we now look for people who are creative in the form of art, music, humour etc. and we are attracted to celebs as they tend to possess a lot of these creative talents that we want so much.
Darwin conducted a study to support the attraction of creative individuals by looking at birds and finding that female birds were most attracted to the males with the most complex songs. This finding was then used by other researchers to justify how people are attracted to creative individuals. Duck used Darwin’s findings and related it to humans in another supporting study and found that relationships between people tend to last longer if there is creativity and cognitive variety within the relationship as boredom is a big factor for terminating a relationship and creativity gets rid of a lot of boredom. This supports attraction to creative individuals as evolutionary explanation of the attraction of celebs as it shows that we are in fact drawn to the most creative people, lots of these being celebs and therefore people are attracted to celebs to combat boredom with their creativity.
However this theory can be seen to be deterministic as it suggests that our interest in celebs is not within our own control and ignores our own free will. It also cannot explain things like why younger people are more attracted to celebs than older people.
Another evolutionary explanation of the attraction of celebs is Celebrity Gossip. This says that we are attracted to celebs in order to have something to talk about and bond over with people in our group that people from other groups ‘wouldn’t understand’. This has evolved from people in or EEA exchanging social information within their own group.
DeBacker (2007) conducted a study to support Celeb Gossip by surveying 800 participants and finding that the majority of participants saw gossip as a useful way of acquiring information about social group members; media exposure was a strong predictor of interest in celebs.DeBacker concluded that media exposure could lead us to the misbelief that celebs were actually a part of our group therefore we would want to gossip about them to find things out about them just as we would with other members within our social group.
A criticism of evolutionary explanations of the attraction of celebs is that it is very on the side of nature in the nature/nurture debate which means it ignores explanations such as social-psychological explanations which explain the side of nurture. This is a criticism as both nature and nurture have been found to be important in explaining the attraction of celebs so without the nurture side it can never fully explainthe attraction of celebs.
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