Hello everyone, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. I am Penguin-sensei.
The moment you see the words, ‘So-and-so announces marriage.’
Even if you aren’t a fan of that celebrity, for some reason you click on it. And then you search for more.
‘Who is the partner,’ ‘How they met,’ ‘Length of relationship,’ ‘Ex-boyfriend.’ Before you know it, you’re even opening Wikipedia. When you think about it calmly, it’s quite strange.
No matter who that person marries, your salary won’t increase by a single yen. Your lifespan won’t extend. Your dinner won’t have any extra side dishes.
And yet, humans are incredibly interested in other people’s love lives. Today, I will explore this mystery from the perspectives of neuroscience and psychology.
Why do we go out of our way to search for the love lives of people who have almost nothing to do with us?
Conclusion: Being interested in other people’s love lives is quite ‘human’.
First, the conclusion.
Searching for celebrity marriages cannot be explained by mere nosiness.
For the human brain, information like ‘who is dating whom,’ ‘who broke up,’ and ‘who got married’ is quite typical social information.
Humans have lived in groups for most of their long history.
Knowing who is close to whom, who can be trusted, who likes whom, and who has left the group is useful for smoothing out human relationships.
In modern times, one could consider that the target of this interest has simply expanded from fellow villagers to celebrities and influencers.
In fact, there is research that attempts to explain interest in celebrity gossip through both the mechanism of trying to obtain information useful for social learning and the mechanism of feeling as though celebrities are members of one’s own social network.
In other words, there is no need to feel down about having ‘watched celebrity news again…’
Your brain just likes information about human relationships.
Feeling like celebrities you’ve never met are ‘acquaintances’
Another important concept here is the idea of ‘parasocial relationships.’
Simply put, this is a one-way psychological connection formed toward celebrities, YouTubers, influencers, and the like. Of course, the other party does not know us.
But in this case, we know their face. We know their voice. We have a vague idea of their personality. We even know about their past lovers. We even know their favorite foods.
In the age of social media, we might even see them every single day.
Research also defines parasocial relationships as a “non-reciprocal social and emotional connection with a media figure.” Social media has made that sense of distance even easier to bridge.
That is why when a celebrity gets married, it doesn’t feel like “a stranger got married,” but rather “that person I’ve been watching for so long got married.” This is a big factor.
That is significant.
If you heard that a classmate from school got married, you would wonder, “What kind of person is their partner?” right?
From the brain’s perspective, it is possible that something slightly similar is happening with celebrities.
Why are we especially tempted to click on “marriage” news?
Celebrity news covers many things: new song releases, drama appearances, commercial deals, and event hosting.
But when it comes to “marriage,” “divorce,” “romance,” or “breakups,” we suddenly feel the urge to look.
One reason for this is that it is information that updates our predictions. We unconsciously build a persona for famous people.
“This person seems single,” “These two are apparently dating,” “They don’t seem like the type to get married.” We hold these kinds of predictions.
However, suddenly, they announce, “I got married.” This means we have to rewrite the mental model of that person we had built in our brains.
Gossip research has also shown that, in addition to being a public figure, elements related to the interest, expectations, and reputation of the information are linked to the tendency to want to share that information with others. Other studies have also shown that people are more likely to share social information about public figures than about strangers, and that information which is unusual, interesting, or emotionally moving is more likely to be shared.
That is why “Wait, this person was married!?” is powerful.
The moment a gap between your expectations and reality is created, you want to fill that void.
That is where the searching begins.
The search rabbit hole that starts with “Who is the partner?”
And the scary thing about marriage news is that once you know one thing, the next question arises.
They got married.
↓
Who is the partner?
↓
When did they start dating?
↓
Where did they meet?
↓
What is the age gap?
↓
Who were their past partners?
↓
Come to think of it, who were they rumored to be with before?
In this way, a search that was supposed to take 10 seconds at first enters overtime.
This is also related to the fact that humans try to understand social information not as isolated facts, but as stories of human relationships.
The information that “Person A and Person B met, dated, and got married” is richer than the single point that “Person A got married.”
Furthermore, gossip is thought to have a function of learning about society by observing others. Experimental studies have shown that exchanging information about others influences impression formation and subsequent behavior toward that person, and also plays a role in the social bonds between the people conversing.
In other words, it can be said that humans have been learning about humanity from talking about others for thousands of years, even while thinking, “What is the point of only talking about other people?”
There is even research showing that the “reward system” reacts to gossip
There is an even more interesting study.
An fMRI study published in 2015 examined brain activity when listening to positive/negative gossip about oneself, a close friend, or a celebrity.
The results showed that for negative gossip about celebrities, even though the participants themselves did not strongly report feeling “particularly happy,” an increase in brain activity related to the reward system was observed. Please do not misunderstand this point.
This is not a study that can be simplified to “humans love celebrity misfortune.”
The experimental conditions are limited, and one cannot determine human emotions solely from brain activity. However, at the very least, it is interesting that social information about others is not processed by the brain as mere meaningless noise.
It has also been reported that there are overlapping neural substrates, such as the striatum, in the processing of social rewards and monetary rewards.
For humans, ‘society’ is information of that much value.
And we use others’ romantic lives to confirm ‘ourselves’.
Let’s look at this from a slightly different angle.
When we see news of a celebrity’s marriage, are we really just looking at them?
Married at 29. Married after 10 years of dating. A whirlwind marriage after six months of dating. An age-gap marriage. Remarriage. The choice not to have children. When we see information like this, we sometimes unconsciously compare it to our own lives.
‘I’m already 30, but… ‘ ‘That’s a nice couple.’ ‘Getting married after 10 years is wonderful.’ ‘Maybe I don’t need to get married.’
We are using celebrities as material to confirm our own values.
There is also research examining the relationship between parasocial relationships with celebrities, social comparison, and self-evaluation, which shows that watching celebrities does not simply lower self-evaluation, but that the impact changes depending on how one feels about the person and the nature of the relationship.
In other words, while it may seem like we are watching others’ romantic lives, in reality, we are watching our own lives. This might be the power of romantic news.
That is why it is hard to stop in the age of social media
In the past, our contact with celebrities was through television, magazines, and newspapers. That was about it.
Things are different now. We check Instagram in the morning, X at noon, and TikTok at night. We also watch YouTube.
If you watch your favorite celebrities or influencers every day, you might even see their faces more often than those of your real-life friends.
As a result, the psychological boundary between ‘famous people’ and ‘people close to us’ becomes a bit blurred.
Research has also reported that interest in celebrities is more strongly associated with the amount of media exposure than with social isolation itself.
Therefore, it is wrong to assume that ‘watching celebrity news all the time means you are a lonely person.’ We must also consider the aspect that because we see them so often, we feel like we know them.
However, there is one dangerous trap here.
Watching others’ romantic lives is not inherently bad.
The problem arises
when you start using other people’s lives as the benchmark for your own.
What we see as a celebrity’s married life is only a small fraction of their life. A luxurious wedding. Happy-looking photos. An ideal couple. A wonderful home.
But naturally, we do not know everything that goes on behind the scenes.
Yet, we still compare ourselves, thinking, ‘That person got married at 30’ or ‘I’m still…’ Social media is filled with the highlights of people’s lives.
If you compare those highlights with your own daily life, it is only natural that your own life might seem dull.
Furthermore, one should be cautious of ‘rumors.’ Research has shown that even gossip explicitly stated to have low reliability can influence how we evaluate a person.
Therefore, as you repeatedly view information like ‘it seems that…’ or ‘according to insiders,’ there is a possibility that you might start to perceive it as fact.
Watching is your freedom. However, separating fact from speculation is quite important in the internet age.
Try doing just one thing the moment you open celebrity news
The next time you click on a celebrity marriage news story,
You don’t need to stop searching. Instead, just ask yourself once: ‘What was it that caught my interest just now?’
The partner’s face? Age? How they met? The age they got married? The length of their relationship? Surprisingly, the answer reveals your own values.
If you are curious about the ‘marriage age,’ you might be conscious of your own age.
If you are curious about ‘how they met,’ you might be interested in how relationships begin.
If you are curious about their ‘marital harmony,’ you might be searching for the kind of relationship you desire.
Try changing celebrity news from a tool for peeking at others into a tool for knowing yourself.
If you do that, the meaning of the same search changes a little.
Being interested in others’ love lives might be because you are thinking about your own life
A celebrity gets married. We click. We look up the partner. We read about how they met. And sometimes, we compare it to our own love life or life in general. At first glance, it is just killing time.
But from the perspective of the brain, multiple mechanisms are layered there, such as interest in social information, parasocial intimacy, social learning, comparison, and reward. That is why I do not think looking at celebrity news is a waste in itself.
The problem is what happens after you see that information. Do you feel down after seeing someone else’s happiness? Or do you use it as material to think about ‘how I want to live’? Even with the same news, the way you use it is completely different. And surely, another marriage announcement will come across our feeds today. We will probably click on it again.
And that is fine.
However, hidden behind that click might be not just an interest in others, but a question about yourself.When people are curious about others’ lives, they are often, unexpectedly, looking at their own lives.
*This article explains general trends based on psychology and neuroscience research and does not uniformly explain individual behavior or psychology.
Thank you for reading this far.
When you see a celebrity marriage announcement, which do you search for first: the ‘partner,’ ‘age,’ or ‘how they met’? Let me know in the comments.
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#BrainScience
#Psychology
#Love
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