Monday, January 09, 2012

Digit ratios and celebrity worship

A new study in Personality and Individual Differences looked at Korean teenagers and found that girls with more feminine digit ratios are much more likely to worship celebrities. The authors interpret this to mean that celebrity worship is a form of submissiveness seen in feminine girls ("feminine" meaning the girls were feminized by sex hormones prenatally):
The current study tested the hypothesis that digit ratios would be associated with celebrity worship, especially among adolescents. Our sample consisted of 45 male and 61 female participants aged 12–14 years (M = 13.20, SD = 0.71). We measured the digit ratios on the participants’ right hands and used the 23 items of the revised Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) to explore the degree to which participants engaged in celebrity worship. The average digit ratio was 0.95 (SD = 0.04) among male participants and 0.97 (SD = 0.05) among female participants. The mean CAS scores were 50.06 (SD = 20.63) for male participants and 64.49 (SD = 18.04) for female participants. The digit ratios for the entire sample were positively correlated with CAS scores (r = 0.29, p < 0.005). However, the digit ratios were positively correlated with CAS scores among female (r = 0.51, p < 0.001) but not male (r = −0.13, p = .394) participants. Our research found evidence of a significant positive correlation between 2D:4D ratios and celebrity worship in females but not in males, which indicated that females with lower digit ratios were less likely to worship celebrities.
I thought it was a sexist society that makes girls but not boys go crazy for rock stars.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:03 AM

    Your hyperlink is broken. I suspect this is what you intended to link to.

    B.B.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12:40 PM

    Seems pretty unnecessary really - females are more interested in the world of gossip because they are female and more feminine females are obviously going to be even more into this than the average females. No submissiveness required.

    ReplyDelete
  3. B.B: Thanks--I think I fixed it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am presenting this paper in my MSc Psychology to highlight the utter rubbish published that is 'anti-celebrity worship'. "How to spot a Celebrity Worshipper" comes to mind whilst reading this paper! The media would have a field day!

    ReplyDelete

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