Who Are the True Fans? Evidence from an Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

Fans of celebrities commonly exist in modern society. Researchers from social science have been concerned with this problem for years. Furthermore, such researchers have attempted to measure people’s involvement with celebrities in various ways. However, no study measured the degree of addiction to a specific celebrity at the neurological level. Therefore, the current study employed visually evoked event related potentials (ERPs) to examine people’s attitude toward celebrities by comparing different brain activities of fans and non-fans when they were shown a set of photos. These photos include a specific celebrity, a familiar person, a stranger and a butterfly. Furthermore, to examine the validity of the detected neural index, we also investigated the correlation between brain activity and the score of the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS), which was a questionnaire used to explore people’s attitude toward celebrities at behavioral level. Two groups of subjects were asked to complete an implicit task, i.e., to press a button when a picture of a butterfly appeared. Results revealed that fans showed significant positive N2 and P300 deflection when viewing the photos of their favorite celebrity, whereas in the non-fan group, the subjects only showed larger P300 amplitude as a response to the celebrity’s photos. Furthermore, a positive correlation between P300 amplitude elicited by the stimuli of a celebrity face and CAS scores was also observed. These findings indicated fan attitude to a specific celebrity can also be observed at the neurological level and suggested the potential utility of using ERP component as an index of fandom involvement.