Would You Rather Be a Celebrity or a Hero? Revisiting the Question

We administered a brief version of a measure of admiration for one’s favorite celebrity, Celebrity Attitude Scale-7 (CAS-7; Zsila et al., 2024), and brief measures of either the desire to be a hero/heroine or the desire to be a celebrity to two rounds of college students assigned randomly to one of four groups. We used a two (desire to be a celebrity vs desire to be a hero) by two (wealthy or non-wealthy) ANOVA to determine which condition yielded the highest preference scores. Based on a previous study (Grabbe et al., 2024) we hypothesized and found that the desire to be a hero would be stronger than the desire to be a celebrity. Our second hypothesis was that the desire to be wealthy will be stronger than the desire to be non-wealthy. This was confirmed in round one, but disconfirmed in round two. The hypothesized interaction that the desire to be a hero, coupled with the added bonus of becoming wealthy, would result in stronger desire scores compared to the other three conditions, was disconfirmed. Those randomly assigned to the hero condition actually scored slightly higher on the desire to not become wealthy than those assigned to the hero condition who chose to be wealthy. We also hypothesized and found in both rounds that there would be a positive correlation between scores on the CAS-7 and scores on a measure of the desire to be a celebrity. Discussion focused on the possibility that non-celebrities have come to realize that many celebrities are rather ordinary persons who sometimes behave badly. Furthermore, our study lends additional reliability and validity to the CAS-7.