Great analysis! I think it gets murky when the celebrity believes strongly in the appropriateness of the intervention but this isn't in line with the evidence base or standard of care-- pandemic examples abound. In these cases, they aren't trying to motivate unhealthy behavior, but they have a powerful influence on behavior that isn't driven from anything beyond personal experience.
Yeah pandemic-era celebrity effects, which we haven’t personally looked into (at least, not yet), feel like a totally different phenomenon than these examples. I wouldn’t be surprised to see changes in behavior brought on by celebrities--good, bad, and neither--though it might be tough to feel confident about causal relationships given everything else going on that would have been influencing behaviors such as the political milieu that wasn’t really at play in the examples here. But I still imagine that, say, whatever your neighbors were doing with masking in the grocery store would have been more influential than what various celebrities were saying.
Food for thought for non-celebrities in the current media landscape where getting a platform for yourself is easier.
On a related note, are people following the John Green/Tuberculosis story? It's a crazy one about celebrity impact, and one that really instills hope in the idea of a well-informed community getting to work.
Great analysis! I think it gets murky when the celebrity believes strongly in the appropriateness of the intervention but this isn't in line with the evidence base or standard of care-- pandemic examples abound. In these cases, they aren't trying to motivate unhealthy behavior, but they have a powerful influence on behavior that isn't driven from anything beyond personal experience.
Yeah pandemic-era celebrity effects, which we haven’t personally looked into (at least, not yet), feel like a totally different phenomenon than these examples. I wouldn’t be surprised to see changes in behavior brought on by celebrities--good, bad, and neither--though it might be tough to feel confident about causal relationships given everything else going on that would have been influencing behaviors such as the political milieu that wasn’t really at play in the examples here. But I still imagine that, say, whatever your neighbors were doing with masking in the grocery store would have been more influential than what various celebrities were saying.
Food for thought for non-celebrities in the current media landscape where getting a platform for yourself is easier.
On a related note, are people following the John Green/Tuberculosis story? It's a crazy one about celebrity impact, and one that really instills hope in the idea of a well-informed community getting to work.