Is Celebrity Admiration Related to the Stigmatization of Persons with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between people’s tendency to worship celebrities and their inclination to stigmatize people with post-traumatic stress disorder. We administered measures of stigmatization directed toward people with PTSD, conservatism, and admiration for a favorite celebrity and celebrities in general. Results of a pilot study showed that persons who showed a stronger tendency to stigmatize also tended to more strongly admire their favorite celebrity and celebrities in general. However, the pilot study sampled persons through Amazon Mechanical Turk and did not control for the possibility of either an “agreeing” response set or careless responding. We replicated portions of the pilot study correcting for deficiencies in the pilot study, and attempted to determine if conservatism might be related to high scores on both stigmatization and celebrity admiration. We found that persons who showed a tendency to stigmatize also tended to admire their favorite celebrity more strongly, though the correlations were weaker compared to those found in the pilot study. Conservatism scores were generally unrelated to scores on a measure of admiration for a favorite celebrity. Discussion focused on explanations for our results and implications of too strongly admiring one’s favorite celebrity.