Psychologists explain the desire to own celebrity goods

Why are people willing to pay ridiculous sums of money for products, provided that they are celebrity-related?

That was the question that psychologists at Yale, the University of Auckland and Arizona State have puzzled over. Their findings, which seek to explain the seemingly illogical nature of these purchases, were published recently.

In 2004, Eric Clapton sold his Fender Stratocaster named Blackie for $959,500. A replica of this guitar, made with painstaking attention to detail, down to the burn mark from his cigarettes, fetched $30,000 in a recent auction.

Some people might rationalize their purchases as good investments, or memorabilia valuable due to pleasant associations. However, these are not the primary reasons that such purchases are made.

The researchers asked participants how much they would like to own objects that had been in the possession of popular celebrities like George Clooney, and then of controversial figures like Saddam Hussein.

There was no correlation between how much participants liked the celebrity and the value assigned to the objects, which contradicts the theory that they buy memorabilia for pleasant associations.

Furthermore, people were no less eager to acquire relics from their idols (although not from pariahs) upon being told that they could not be resold.

Rather, the phenomena have been encapsulated in terms of “celebrity contagion” and “imitative magic.” They can be explained, the researchers claim, in part, by an instinct which has helped people survive disasters: a belief that certain properties are contagious.

For instance, a sweater owned by a celebrity becomes more valuable if the prospective buyer learns that the celebrity actually wore it.

However, if it had subsequently been cleaned, it would be less valuable. This implies that some sort of essence from the celebrity had been removed.

In other words, “physical contact with a celebrity boosts the value of an object, so people will pay extra for a guitar that Eric Clapton played, or even held in his hands,” says Dr. Paul Bloom, one of the researchers.

Why then, would anyone be interested in buying a replica of Blackie? The answer lies in a phenomenon that Dr. George E. Newman, another one of the researchers, calls the “law of similarity.”

This type of thinking, which has been chronicled in primitive tribes, holds that things that resemble one another possess similar, potentially magical, powers.

For example, practices such as burning voodoo dolls are consistent with such a belief. Thus, a very close imitation of the original Blackie may serve as a proxy of the real thing, and derives much of its value from this fact.

Even a less faithful replica can have such properties. Mass-produced replicas of famous guitars, claim that veteran collectors may be enabled to play better music.

Thus, even factory-produced merchandise are “imbued with contagious and imitative magic,” say Dr. Karen Fernandez and Dr. John Lastovicka, who worked on a separate study.

These beliefs, while seemingly illogical, make evolutionary sense. Those who avoided those with the plague were less likely to die of it, and have more descendants today.