A recent study by professor Jean Twenge at San Diego State University suggests that we use celebrities as a coping mechanism when we can't or don't expect to connect with others.
Take that and a recent book called "Fame Junkies" by Jake Halpern of teens. Halpern teamed up with several statisticians and orchestrated a survey involving three separate school systems and over 650 teenagers. Many of his findings were deeply troubling. For example – when given the option of “pressing a magic button” and becoming stronger, smarter, famous, or more beautiful – boys in the survey chose fame almost as often as they chose intelligence, and girls chose it more often. Among today’s teenagers, says Halpern, fame appears to be the greatest good.
According to Halpern, "even those teenagers who are not expecting to become famous themselves are very much caught up in this [celebrity] obsession. "
In his survey, Halpern asked teenagers to choose which profession they would most like to have when they grow up. Among girls, 43.4% indicated that they wanted to become assistants to a celebrity. They chose this option twice as often as “the president of a great university like Harvard or Yale,” three times as often as U.S. Senator, and four times as often as “the chief of a major company like General Motors.”
What’s so interesting about this statistic is that, among girls who indicated that they received bad grades in school (i.e., C’s or below), the percentage who opted to become assistants rose to 67%. What’s more, among both boys and girls who got bad grades – and who described themselves as being unpopular at school – the percentage who opted to become assistants rose further to 80%.
So beware people, Diddy is looking for a personal assistant (with a college degree only!) via You Tube and Paris Hilton may very well be planning to become the President of the United States.
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