Is there a correlation between IQ and celebrity worship?

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Yes. On a subsample of n = 681 who answered questions about their attitude towards celebrities, we have found a medium-sized negative correlation between IQ and celebrity worship of r = -0.31 meaning that people with higher IQ tend to worship celebrities less. Here is the scatterplot of this relationship.

However, it has to be noted that we classified attitudes towards celebrities into three categories, social attitudes (e.g., "I find my favorite celebrity really fun to watch, read, or listen to.“), intense personal attitudes (e.g., “When my favorite celebrity succeeds, it feels like it's my success too.“) and pathological attitudes (e.g. “I am such a fan of my favorite celebrity that I am obsessed with learning about them and about all the details of their life.“). This overall negative relationship between IQ and celebrity worship is mostly driven by the negative relationship between IQ and intense personal (r = -0.29) and pathological (r = -0.42) attitudes, while the correlation between IQ and social attitudes was practically non-existent (r = -0.04). 

What do the other studies say?

We have found two other studies that tested the relationship between celebrity attitudes and cognitive abilities. The first one by McCutcheon et al. (2003) on a relatively low sample size (n = 102) found moderate negative correlations between celebrity attitudes and cognitive abilities (i.e. r = -0.31 for spatial ability and r = -0.41 for critical-thinking ability), while a more recent one, on a much larger sample size (n = 1763, by McCutcheon et al., 2021), found substantially smaller correlation between celebrity worship overall score and cognitive tests z-score (r = -0.11). Thus, although somewhat differing in the size of their effects, the studies (including ours) seem to consistently find a negative relationship between cognitive ability and celebrity worship.

Takeaways

• Lower IQ is related to a higher obsession with celebrities

• However, this is not true about more typical positive feeling towards celebrities (e.g.,, really enjoying watching, reading or listening to them), in which case there is no relationship to IQ

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