Tiger Woods. Michael Jackson. Brittany Murphy. Why do we care so much when celebrities die, or cheat on their spouses? Why do we read magazine cover story after cover story about people in rigor mortis or in flagrante delicto with whom we share no personal connection? (I love this collage of New York Post cover stories about Tiger Woods – 20 covers in a row.)
I’ve come to believe that the hidden brain — the ocean of unconscious mental activity that controls much of our everyday lives — is responsible for our fascination with celebrities. Contrary to what numerous commentators tell us, it doesn’t have anything to do with our culture having become cheapened or tawdry. We are repelled and fascinated by the gory details about celebritites in exactly the same manner we are repelled and fascinated by gory goings-on among our friends, coworkers and families — because we unconsciously think of celebrities as being part of our extended kith and kin. More on this in a second.
Over eons of evolution, our brains have been sculpted to find salacious information about our relatives and friends interesting. It’s interesting to know about the coworker who got caught shoplifting at a mall, and it is interesting to know about the cousin who is being unfaithful to her husband. But why should these things be interesting? They are interesting because from an evolutionary standpoint, the information is important. In the small groups in which humans are believed to have evolved and formed the first tribes, and in the small communities that we rely on everyday, information about who is reliable and who is not is crucially important. You would not trust the coworker who shoplifted at Target to watch your back in a tight spot with your boss, because the coworker’s behavior suggests he might be unreliable. You would not know this if you didn’t know about the Target escapade or if your brain (and the brains of your coworkers who pass along the gossip) did not find the information interesting. The fact our brains are programmed to find such information interesting is the reason such information gets around.
All that the mass media have done is extend our sense (at an unconscious level) about whom we consider to be part of our circle of family and friends. I wrote a column about this phenomenon some time ago. We develop close bonds of love and loyalty, or spite and hatred, toward celebrities, and feel personally betrayed or vindicated or saddened when stuff happens to them because we unconsciously think of them in the same way we think about our real kith and kin. In the environment in which humans evolved, there was no television and internet that brought salacious, scandalous or sad goings-on about distant golfing superstars into our homes. The rumors and gossip we heard about, the faces we saw, were the faces of people in our immediate vicinity. What the mass media has done is expand that circle of intimacy to people who are complete strangers. When we see images of people on TV in our homes, we know at a conscious level that these are virtual images, but we believe at an unconscious level that these people are actually in our living rooms and bedrooms, talking with us, and making us hope and laugh and cry.
Our conscious minds may know we will never meet Tiger Woods in person; our unconscious minds already think of him as family. (This is why we find a scandal about a known celebrity interesting, but not a scandal about a celebrity we know nothing about — a superstar athlete in another country who plays a sport we do not understand, for example. Our unconscious minds do not think of that person as family, and we don’t really care when he/she cheats or dies.)
