Hero Worshipping Celebrity Idols Britney Spears Personifies

¶ … Hero Worshipping Celebrity Idols

Britney Spears personifies today's pop culture. Michael Jackson remained the pop icon for the last two decades. Paris Hilton is finally making her mark as the new, radical 'snobbishly rich' personality in Hollywood. Bands of all kinds abound in the music scene. President Bush was both celebrated and maligned in "Fahrenheit 9/11."

These are just few of the personalities who have captured the interest of the public, and developed to become the "idols" of today's society in America. Gone were the years when people excelled in what they do and were recognized for their talent or charisma to the people in their chosen field. What prevails today is a diffusion of the lines determining the boundary between show business and politics. Sometimes, this boundary includes a penetration of private life, too.

This "personal relations" with showbiz and political personalities was further established with the centrality of mass media to the people's lives. Through everyday exposure to the television, Internet, and newspapers, people are always 'in touch' with their idols -- people who were admired for their characteristics or personality, or both. In the same way that mass media has taken center stage in people's lives, these personalities have also become the ideal individual that we intend to imitate or idolize. These idols, in fact, dictate what ought to be the norm behavior in the society, aware that they have the power to influence people.

This paper centers on discussing why people need idols such as show biz and political personalities. The researcher posits that, explained through the observational learning perspective in psychology, people need idols in their lives because the process of imitation or modeling is part of the trial-and-error learning process that people go through as they develop personally (Santrock, 2001:207).

In discussing the phenomenon of imitation or modeling, there are two important concepts that are vital to explaining the need for idols: retention and reinforcement.

In retention, people are initially attracted to a particular characteristics or personality of a celebrity that she or he may consider worth noting -- that is, worth imitating. Attraction to this characteristic is simply the individual's reaction not so much toward the celebrity, but to himself or herself. This means that attraction to a celebrity because of his/her characteristic is mainly due to the individual's unconscious effort to achieve that characteristic, which also means that the individual is trying to 'fill' a 'gap' that s/he is aware that she does not have or possess.

Take as an example the case of Britney Spears' appeal to the youth, both male and female teenagers. For the female teens, Britney represent something they want themselves to be: a young woman who is talented, famous, and physically attractive. Conversely, among males, Britney appeals to them because of the same characteristics the female teens admire her for. However, there is a difference between these groups' motivation for idolizing Britney: while the females wanted to idolize Britney because they want to imitate her, male teens idolize Britney for she embodies the female who they wanted to have. Evidently, biological characteristics such as physical attractiveness are more influential in the process of retention, which eventually results to idolization.

Reinforcement, meanwhile, takes retention to a higher and more developed level. The individual is no longer restrained to just idolize, but is encouraged to imitate the personality whom s/he idolizes. What happens during the reinforcement process is that people learn to identify themselves with the personalities that they idolize, even assuming the behavior of the person. This phenomenon is not uncommon among the youth and even among adults.

This is especially evident among adults, especially when showing their admiration for political personalities. Fervent admiration and desire to imitate the personality leads to imitating the opinions and actions of the personality idolized.