The Perils and Payoffs of Celebrity Status

Hey, did you hear the one about the aspiring actress who moved to Hollywood? She was so dumb, she slept with the writers.

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Admittedly, it’s an old and tired joke. But with this April’s edition of the American Sociological Review, it’s acquired new edge. A research team at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health has compared the longevity of Emmy-winning screenwriters with their not-so-high-falutin’ peers, and they've done the same for baseball Hall of Fame inductees, Emmy-winning actors, and former Presidents and Vice Presidents of the United States. Professor of Sociomedical Sciences Bruce Link and his crew pursued this line of inquiry because modern research has fairly shown a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and long life. They wanted to get specific about the why and when of any correlation.

The team found that the joke really is on screenwriters. On average, Emmy-winning screenwriters die 3 years earlier than their competing peers. This is as compared to Emmy-winning actors, . . .

Read the entire post on Psychology Today.