Fans Who See a Favorite Celebrity as a Soulmate Score Higher on an Authority Scale, Study Finds

One question on the Celebrity Attitude Scale asks if a favorite celebrity feels like a soulmate, bound to the fan by a connection only the two of them would recognize. Psychologists label that answer tier intense-personal, one step below what the scale calls borderline-pathological.

A new study of 331 U.S. adults found that people who land in that tier score higher on a separate, decades-old measure of deference to authority. The pattern held even after researchers controlled for whether those same people called themselves liberal or conservative.

The study behind the headline

The paper, titled Idols and Ideologies, was published online in Psychological Reports and posted October 5. Ho Phi Huynh, a senior lecturer at the Australian National University's School of Medicine and Psychology, led the work with four co-authors: Joshua Williams, Marla Jorgensen, Amy Dicke-Bohmann, and Lynn McCutcheon.

McCutcheon is not a new name in this field. He helped build the Celebrity Attitude Scale itself, publishing the original version with colleagues Lange and Houran in 2002 in the British Journal of Psychology. The instrument used in the new study is a shortened, seven-item version of that same scale.

Huynh's team recruited participants through Prolific, an online survey platform, and deliberately balanced the sample so liberals, moderates, and conservatives were represented in roughly equal numbers. Participants were about 54 percent women, with an average age near 40.

What moved and what didn't

Not every authoritarian trait rose with celebrity admiration. Authoritarian aggression, the drive to punish people who violate social norms, showed the weakest and least consistent link of the three measures tested.

“Celebrity admiration was not related to authoritarian aggression, which involves strictness and social control.”

Conservatism and traditionalism, the two measures that did move with celebrity admiration, both track a preference for existing social order rather than the urge to punish people who break from it. Huynh described the broader pattern in plain terms: "People who report admiring their favorite celebrity are more likely to submit to authority and prefer traditional norms."

A paradox the researchers can't yet explain

Plenty of the celebrities fans admire most hold very different politics than their own fans do. Huynh and his co-authors pointed to that gap as a paradox worth naming: many devoted fans follow stars associated with progressive causes, like climate action or social justice, while the fans themselves score higher on measures tied to tradition and deference.

The study did not ask participants to name their favorite celebrity, so it cannot confirm the actual politics of any specific star involved. The paradox is an observation about the pattern, not a tested claim.

What the study can't tell us

The design is cross-sectional, meaning every participant answered every question at a single point in time. That rules out any claim about which came first: whether people already drawn to authority also gravitate toward intense fandom, or whether years of deep fandom nudge people toward deference.

The team also did not measure narcissism or a general preference for social hierarchy, two traits other celebrity-worship research has flagged as relevant, and they did not ask whether a participant's favorite celebrity was an entertainer or a political figure. Every participant lived in the United States, so the pattern may not hold in countries with a different relationship to celebrity culture.

Celebrity-worship research goes back decades, building on the original Celebrity Attitude Scale that McCutcheon helped design in 2002. Whether this specific authoritarianism link has shown up before in that body of work, or whether it breaks from an earlier null finding, is something Trestlewire could not independently verify by publication time.

For now, the data says something narrower than fans are authoritarian. It says the people most willing to call a stranger on a screen their soulmate are also, on average, a little more willing to call obedience a virtue, regardless of which political team they think they're on.