An interesting New York Times article on our desire to be famous. This is not only interesting because it tackles the most interesting question of human psychology but also because I just started taking two pyschology courses in preparation for grad school!
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Mental Health & Behavior
The Fame Motive
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: August 22, 2006
Money and power are handy, but millions of ambitious people are after something other than the corner office or the beach house on St. Bart�s. They want to swivel necks, to light a flare in others� eyes, to walk into a crowded room and feel the conversation stop. They are busy networking, auditioning, talking up their latest project � a screenplay, a memoir, a new reality show � to satisfy a desire so obvious it is all but invisible.
What�s the formula for fame? Some write fictionalized memoirs, like James Frey, top; others, like Paris Hilton, above, become famous for, well, simply being famous.
�To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you�re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that�s what people want, in my opinion,� said Kaysar Ridha, 26, of Irvine, Calif., a recent favorite of fans of the popular CBS reality series �Big Brother.� �It�s strange and twisted, because when that attention does come, the irony is you want more privacy.�
For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.
