A comparative study on the effects of attachment to heroes and celebrities

The current study investigates on the antecedents and the outcome variables of the attachment toward two types of human brands, celebrities and heroes. The main objective of this study is to examine how attachment toward human brands, particularly celebrity versus hero, is differently affected by the antecedents, and does differently affect psychological well-being. The three frequently mentioned variables, i.e., attractiveness, credibility, and self-image congruity, were used as antecedents whereas the important psychological variables such as self-efficacy and psychological well-being as outcome variables. Several important hypotheses were developed according to the major studies in the fields. To empirically test the hypotheses, we conducted a survey study and analyzed the data using a structural equation modeling method. Several interesting results came out. We found that attractiveness was the strongest variable for the attachment toward celebrities while self-image congruity was for the attachment toward heroes. We also found that the attachment toward celebrities did not have a significant effect on self-efficacy whereas the attachment toward heroes significantly did. Most importantly, self-efficacy had a significant effect on psychological well-being especially for the case of heroes. Overall we found that, the attachment to hero affects people’s psychological well-being through self-efficacy while the attachment toward celebrity dose not. Several important academic and practical implications were also provided.