Take 331 US adults, recruited through Prolific and balanced so that roughly a third call themselves liberal, a third moderate, a third conservative. Measure how much each one admires their favorite celebrity — mild, “I enjoy following their career” admiration up through the intense, “this person is basically my soulmate” end of the scale. Then measure where they land on the three components of right-wing authoritarianism. Run the correlations and see what lines up with what. That’s the design behind Idols and Ideologies: Examining Associations Between Celebrity Admiration and Right-Wing Authoritarianism, published Oct 5, 2026 in Psychological Reports by Ho Phi Huynh, Joshua L. Williams, Marla F. Jorgensen, Amy Dicke-Bohmann, and Lynn McCutcheon, covered the same day by PsyPost.

The finding, in short: celebrity admiration predicts submission to authority and a preference for preserving the status quo, and the more intense the admiration, the stronger that prediction gets. It does not predict wanting to punish or control other people — the aggressive, controlling side of authoritarianism barely moved. A British team proposed this exact link in 2001 and found nothing. Twenty-five years and an ocean later, it showed up. Étienne de La Boétie never heard of a celebrity in anything like the modern sense. But sometime around 1552, barely out of his teens, he described the mechanism this study just put a number on: tyranny survives not because rulers are strong, but because subjects hand over the submission themselves — often aimed at someone they’ve decided to love.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether celebrity admiration predicts the three components of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)
Who ran it?	Ho Phi Huynh (Australian National University), with Joshua L. Williams, Marla F. Jorgensen, Amy Dicke-Bohmann, and Lynn McCutcheon
Where and when?	Psychological Reports, published Oct 5, 2026; covered the same day by PsyPost
Sample	331 US adults via Prolific, roughly balanced liberal/moderate/conservative, 54% women, average age about 40
Light admiration correlations	Conservatism (submission to authority) r=0.32; Traditionalism r=0.19; Authoritarian Aggression r=0.15
Intense admiration correlations	Conservatism r=0.45; Traditionalism r=0.32; Authoritarian Aggression r=0.13
What didn’t move	Authoritarian Aggression — weak at both intensity levels, meaning the link is about deference, not a taste for strictness or control
What came before	A 2001 British study first proposed the celebrity–authoritarianism link and found no significant association
What La Boétie already argued	In Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (written c. 1552, published 1576), a ruler holds power only because subjects consent to it — and often love doing so

The Quick Version

Right-wing authoritarianism has three faces in the research literature: a taste for strict social control, a preference for tradition, and a willingness to defer to authority. A 2026 study found that people who admire celebrities intensely score higher on the deference and tradition faces specifically — not the control face. Étienne de La Boétie argued in 1576 that this is exactly how tyranny works. Not by force. Because subjects supply the submission themselves, frequently aimed at someone they’ve chosen to adore.

What the Study Actually Found

Huynh and his coauthors weren’t fishing for a connection nobody had considered. The idea that people who defer easily to authority might also be drawn to celebrities — treated, after all, as authorities on music, fashion, politics, how to live — had been proposed before. A 2001 study of British participants tested it and came up empty. No significant association. For a quarter century, that was effectively the end of the question.

This study revived it with a bigger toolkit. The 331 participants completed a celebrity admiration measure that separates two levels: an “entertainment-social” level, which is mostly enjoying a celebrity’s work and following their news, and a more intense, borderline-pathological level, marked by feeling the celebrity is a soulmate or a special, personal bond. Against that, they measured the three components researchers typically split right-wing authoritarianism into — conservatism (submission to authority and defense of the existing order), traditionalism (attachment to conventional norms), and authoritarian aggression (strictness and social control directed at others).

The correlations were consistent and, per the authors, “robust and reliable.” Light admiration correlated with the submission-to-authority dimension at r=0.32 and traditionalism at r=0.19. Intense admiration pushed those up to r=0.45 and r=0.32. Hierarchical regression showed celebrity admiration kept predicting RWA-conservatism and traditionalism even after the researchers controlled for demographics and each person’s own political orientation — meaning this isn’t just “conservatives already defer to authority and also happen to like celebrities.” The admiration itself carried independent weight.

What didn’t move is the detail worth sitting with. Authoritarian aggression — the component about wanting strictness and control imposed on others — showed only weak correlations: r=0.15 for light admiration, r=0.13 for intense. The researchers were direct about what this means: celebrity admiration isn’t related to wanting to crack down on people. It’s related to wanting someone above you to follow.

Why Do Fans Submit to Authority?

1. The correlation is about deference, not control. Authoritarian aggression — the punitive, controlling face of RWA — barely moved (r=0.15 and r=0.13). Whatever celebrity admiration is doing, it isn’t making people want to dominate others. It’s making them more comfortable being dominated.
2. Intensity scales the effect. Casually enjoying a celebrity’s work correlated with submission to authority at r=0.32. Feeling that celebrity is a soulmate pushed the same correlation to r=0.45 — the deeper the attachment, the stronger the deference.
3. It held up after controlling for politics. The study found celebrity admiration predicted RWA-conservatism and traditionalism beyond what a person’s own stated political orientation already explained. The admiration is doing work on its own.
4. A prior study swung and missed. British researchers proposed this link in 2001 and found no significant association. A null result in one sample, a quarter century ago, didn’t settle the question — it just meant the right conditions, or the right measure, hadn’t been found yet.
5. It rhymes with an argument that predates the survey by 450 years. La Boétie’s claim was never that tyrants compel love. It’s that the love — or the admiration, or the devotion — comes first, and the submission rides in on its back.

What Did La Boétie Mean by Voluntary Servitude?

Voluntary servitude is Étienne de La Boétie’s term for the puzzle at the center of his Discourse: why do people who vastly outnumber a ruler, and who could simply stop complying, actively cooperate with him instead? His answer: habit, self-interest, and a particular kind of borrowed affection do the work that force would otherwise have to do, and they do it just as effectively.

La Boétie wrote the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude around 1552, as a student in his early twenties, and it sat unpublished for decades before appearing in 1576, more than a decade after his death in 1563 at thirty-two. His closest friend, Michel de Montaigne, held the manuscript and deliberately kept it out of print for years — then, when Huguenot pamphleteers got hold of it anyway and started using it as ammunition against the French crown, Montaigne began insisting the piece was juvenilia, the work of a boy of sixteen rather than a serious political argument. Modern scholars think that revision was less about biographical accuracy and more about damage control for a dead friend’s reputation. The essay was dangerous enough that the person who loved La Boétie most wanted it read as a youthful exercise, not a thesis.

The thesis itself is blunt: “it is not the troops on horseback, it is not the companies afoot, it is not arms that defend the tyrant.” A tyrant has no soldiers of his own — only soldiers drawn from the very people he rules, who could simply put down their arms. La Boétie’s sharpest observation, though, isn’t about coercion at all. It’s about affection. Writing about Nero — a tyrant whose cruelty was well documented even in his own time — La Boétie notes that after his death, “the noble Roman people, mindful of his games and his festivals, were saddened to the point of wearing mourning for him.” Nero performed. He staged spectacles. And the people he terrorized grieved him anyway, because the part of him they’d been shown wasn’t the terrifying part. It was the entertaining one.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

The connection here isn’t “a sixteenth-century Frenchman predicted a 2026 psychology study.” It’s narrower, and it holds up better for being narrower: La Boétie’s specific claim was that affection for someone elevated above you functions as a training ground for submission generally — that loving a figure of apparent authority and status primes a person to defer to authority more broadly, not just to that one figure. This study measured a modern version of exactly that mechanism, with celebrities standing in for rulers, and found the correlation where La Boétie’s argument said to look for it: in deference and conventionalism, not in aggression.

It connects directly to what Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance explained about Taylor Swift fans — the finding that highly identified fans rationalize a celebrity’s bad behavior rather than revise their admiration. That study showed fans protecting the idol from evidence. This one suggests the protection runs both directions: the more a person is primed to defend and defer to an idol, the more comfortable they may be deferring to authority generally. Rationalization and submission look like two faces of the same underlying posture.

It also sits close to the twin-family study that confirmed Adorno’s thesis about authoritarianism — the finding that right-wing authoritarianism runs in families through genetics and shared environment, while the drive to dominate others doesn’t. That study found submission and aggression have different roots. This one finds celebrity admiration tracks with submission specifically and barely touches aggression. The two studies, measuring completely different things, keep landing on the same seam: deference and dominance are not the same trait, and they don’t share a cause.

And it connects to Tocqueville’s argument that loving democracy isn’t enough to protect it. Tocqueville worried less about whether people loved equality — they plainly did — and more about what stood between that love and its worst version. La Boétie’s worry is the same shape, aimed earlier in the chain: it isn’t the love of a ruler, or a celebrity, that’s the problem by itself. It’s what that love quietly trains a person to accept as normal.

La Boétie’s closest reader, fittingly, is Montaigne himself, who spent his own essays interrogating how little anyone — including himself — really understands their own motives. He knew La Boétie’s argument intimately enough to suppress it for years. If there’s a Montaignean lesson sitting underneath this study, it’s that the people most confidently deferring to authority through their admiration of a celebrity are unlikely to describe what they’re doing as submission. They’d describe it as taste.

The Gap Between a Pamphlet and a Survey

Here’s where the comparison gets more interesting than a clean match, and it’s worth sitting with rather than smoothing over.

La Boétie was writing about political tyranny — a single ruler holding an entire population in check through habituated consent. The 2026 study is measuring something much smaller and more diffuse: an individual’s private admiration for a pop star, an actor, an athlete, correlated with a general disposition toward authority that has nothing to do with that celebrity directly ruling anyone. Nobody in this sample is being governed by their favorite celebrity. The leap from “admires a celebrity” to “more willing to submit to authority in general” is the study’s whole contribution, and it’s a correlational leap, not a demonstrated chain of cause and effect.

That gap cuts both ways. It would be too easy to read this study as proof that fandom is a rehearsal for authoritarian politics. The honest reading is narrower: an attitude toward a specific kind of elevated, admired figure tracks with an attitude toward authority in general, in a way a British study failed to detect twenty-five years ago and this one did. That’s a real finding. It is not a theory of how tyrants are made.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

It’s worth being precise about the size of this, because the framing invites more confidence than the data earns.

Correlational, Not Causal

Nothing here was manipulated. The study can’t tell you whether admiring celebrities nudges someone toward deference, whether a prior disposition toward deference makes celebrity admiration more appealing, or whether some third factor produces both. The regression controls for demographics and political orientation, but control variables aren’t the same as a causal design.

A Prolific Sample, Not a Population

331 US adults recruited through an online research platform is a real, useful sample for testing a correlation — it is not a nationally representative one. Prolific skews toward people comfortable with online surveys, which is its own kind of selection.

Self-Report All the Way Down

Both celebrity admiration and authoritarian attitudes were measured by asking people to rate their own agreement with statements. That’s standard practice in this literature, and it’s still a limitation — people’s self-reports of their own deference aren’t the same as observing their actual behavior under authority.

The 2001 Null Result Still Matters

A finding that didn’t replicate for twenty-five years, then did, deserves some humility rather than certainty. It’s possible the earlier British study used a less sensitive measure. It’s also possible something about celebrity culture, or political culture, shifted enough between 2001 and 2026 that the relationship itself changed. The study doesn’t adjudicate between those explanations.

What Actually Follows From This

1. Separate admiration from submission before assuming either. Enjoying a celebrity’s work is extremely common and, per this study, only weakly tied to authoritarian submission. The strong correlation shows up specifically at the intense, soulmate-level end — which is a much smaller group than “people who have a favorite celebrity.”
2. Notice what the finding doesn’t say. This isn’t a study claiming fans are more aggressive, more punitive, or more interested in controlling other people. If anything, that part of the picture came back closer to the floor than the ceiling.
3. Treat La Boétie’s question as a live one, not a historical curiosity. His central move was refusing to locate tyranny only in the tyrant — he insisted on asking what the subjects were doing to sustain it. A study correlating celebrity admiration with deference to authority is, in its narrow and modern way, still asking his question.

La Boétie never ran a regression and never watched a parasocial bond form over a livestream. He had a manuscript, a friend who suppressed it out of love, and a conviction that servitude needs the willing cooperation of the served far more than it needs the strength of the server. Four hundred and seventy years later, a team of psychologists measured something adjacent to that claim in 331 people who’d never read him, and found deference where his argument said to look. The Roman crowd wore mourning for Nero because he’d given them games and festivals. The chains, in both stories, were never the point. The attachment was.

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This post discusses a 2026 correlational study published in Psychological Reports and Étienne de La Boétie’s 1576 essay Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The study’s findings come from 331 US adults recruited via Prolific and describe correlations, not demonstrated causation, between self-reported celebrity admiration and self-reported authoritarian attitudes — they are not a claim about what causes authoritarian politics, celebrity fandom in general, or any specific celebrity or public figure.