The Less the Public Knows the Better? The Effects of Increased Knowledge on Celebrity Evaluations

Abstract

Celebrities are figures that people like a lot but know little about. Two experiments investigated how celebrity evaluations are affected by increased knowledge. In Experiment 1, heightened knowledge of the political orientation, faith, and social attitudes of two prominent actors led to less favorable evaluations and greater differentiation in the evaluations of the actors along political and gender lines. In Experiment 2, increasing participants' cognizance of their limited knowledge of popular entertainers led to less positive evaluations and diminished credibility of the celebrities as spokespersons. The findings suggest that increasing knowledge and meta-knowledge of celebrities may diminish their marketability.