Most people admire celebrities in some form or another and this tends to be completely harmless and sometimes even beneficial for people. However sometimes this goes further than just admiration and can result in obsession or intense fandom. Celebrity Worship is one form of this.
One Model which can explain Celebrity Worship is the absorption addiction Model (AAM) which was put forward by McCutcheon et al (2002) and it applies to people with a weak sense of individuality and those who feel they are lacing something in their life. IT consists of three stages; ‘Entertainment-Social’, which is the least intense form of celeb worship where people worship celebs because of their entertainment value, ‘Intense-Personal’ where fans show compulsive and intense behaviour towards a celeb, and ‘Borderline-Pathological’ which is the most extreme form of celeb worship and fans start to have irrational and uncontrollable behaviours towards a celeb.
Houran, Navik and Zerrusen conducted a study to support the AAM as a model for Celeb worship by having 140 US College students complete the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS), a scale where high scores indicate over identification and obsession with celebs. They found that high scores on the CAS were associated with identity diffusion and poor interpersonal boundaries supporting the fact that through the AAM those with a weak sense of individuality are most likely to form intense fandom in the form of celeb worship.
This study can be criticised however as the results found were only correlational and therefore cannot show a cause and effect relationship between Celeb worship and individuality. It was also a self-report method which means that demand characteristics could have been apparent in the participants and they could have given answers they thought were socially desirable rather than truthful ones. This means that any conclusions drawn from this study could be based on untruthful evidence.
Religion can also have an effect on Intense Fandom in the form of Celebrity Worship. In Christianity Especially in the 10 commandments it is said that it is forbid to worship anyone but God. Maltby et al (2002) conducted a study to see if this had an effect on a Christian’s likelihood to worship a celeb by comparing participant’s scores on a score of religiosity and on the CAS. They found that as religiosity increased the tendency to worship celebrities decreased. This supports the fact that Religion can have an effect on Intense Fandom however research has only been carried out on Christianity and therefore results cannot be generalised to other religions.
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