Why do many of us pay good money to bury our noses in Hello! magazine or scan the photos from the latest red carpet event, becoming almost obsessed by the lives of people we may never even meet? One possibility is that it taps into a primitive system by which we find paying attention to attractive and socially dominant individuals intrinsically valuable and rewarding. This idea has been around since the 1960s, when anthropologists Clifford Jolly and Michael Chance first suggested that for social primates the desire to look at high-ranking individuals might act like a kind of social glue, keeping a group together. In that sense it does sound rather like the way we treat celebrities rnand our more exuberant leaders.
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