Like, why do you care so much if she’s sleeping with a new guy after just divorcing or her coming out or that rich family buying a new mansion? How does that affect your life?
Like, why do you care so much if she’s sleeping with a new guy after just divorcing or her coming out or that rich family buying a new mansion? How does that affect your life?
From an evolutionary standpoint it’s important to know what’s going on with people close to you. Who are people close to you? Why, obviously people who you’re familiar with - those whose faces you recognise and whose names you know.
So yeah, it’s a bug in how we’re coded.
I think people have a tendency to use evolutionary psychology as a crutch in explaining human behaviour. Like they suggest it can explain everything when it’s only one factor of many.
However in this specific case your theory makes a lot of sense to me.
You’re talking about at least millions of people making billions of decisions. It’s always going to have multiple factors. But evolution is almost always directly relevant, because it shaped our brain to the patterns it follows.
In this example, there are also plenty of external factors. The internet makes it possible to follow the behavior of celebrities. The celebrities have significant marketing teams actively trying to grab your interest (plus whatever businesses they’re famous in relation to trying to piggy back). The fact that you don’t have to spend 18 hours a day tracking prey just in case you manage to kill it. The fact that we’re hugely biased to be interested in more attractive people, to find people we’re exposed to more (especially in more glamorous lights) more attractive and most celebrities are also extremely attractive with professional teams to handle their appearance. The list always goes on.
But evolution is pretty much always a key lens to why we are what we are, because it actually is the why to almost all the low level behaviors that add up to big picture specific modern ones.