‘I got my eye on you boy, and when I get my eye on something, it’s like search and destroy.’ –Paris Hilton

The peak of the Spice Girls’ popularity has long passed, but Victoria Beckham – aka Posh Spice – still has massive media exposure. And Paris Hilton, who is famous for her lifestyle alone, makes world headlines daily.
A new psychology study helps explain why some stars burn bright, long, long after their talent has faded – if it ever was there to begin with.
Simply put, says Nathanael Fast of Stanford University in California, people need something to talk about. The human desire to find common ground in conversation pushes us to discuss already popular people, he says.
Fast’s team focused not on gossip column celebrities, but on professional baseball players in the US
“We realised that there’s a ton of stats and performance data available for baseball, so if we can show that famous or well-known baseball players become more prominent than unknown baseball players who perform just as well or better, we’re able to make a convincing case,” he says. (…)
Volunteers who were baseball fans themselves tended to pick an obscure player if they thought they were emailing an expert. Yet the same fans tended to converse about prominent players when they didn’t know anything about their correspondent.
“The very experts who could kind of inform everyone else don’t. They actually keep feeding them the information they already know because that helps establish a connection,” Fast says.















