#49: Fanatical Thinking

Award winning Birtish journalist Charles Thomson returns to Reason Bound to talk about the bane of their existence: unhinged fans. The term "celebrity worship" gets thrown around a lot, but it's very real and it causes very real cognitive issues. While there isn't an abundance of research on people who transition from fans to radical fanatics, Ryan and Charles discuss a study titled: "Cognitive Skills Revisited: Applying Cattell's Two-Factor Theory Of Intelligence In a Cross-Sectional Study". The results of the study demonstrate celebrity worship has a direct association with poor performance on cognitive tests that cannot be accounted for by demographic and socioeconomic factors. Charles and Ryan discuss fandom as a way to establish identity, the impact of fan behavior on the legacy of artists, and what types of toxic behavior fanatics engage in to ascend to positions of authority within particular fandoms. Of course, no episode with Charles would be complete without revisiting Michael Jackson and some of the extremes of his fanbase, including perhaps his most extreme fans of all: his detractors.