The three stages of fandom psychology

May 13, 2026

Vijay was sworn in as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu on May 10, 2026 after his party Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam won 108 seats in its first election. I personally welcomed this change as an alternative to the 70 years of Dravidian brainwashing.

It's been a few days and many people I know are now planning to revisit his filmography and treat the political result as a personal vindication. The vote and the movies are getting fused into one continuous emotional event.

That fusion is what I want to talk about. There is a useful piece of psychology research from 2002 that names exactly this pattern, and once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere, including in yourself.

The devil's advocate position, with a caveat

I will admit something here. I have a reflex to take the unpopular side of an argument, sometimes just for the sake of it. That habit has costs. It can make me contrarian for no good reason, and it can annoy people who are not in the mood for it.

But the habit has also been useful. When everyone around you is celebrating something, the social pressure to celebrate along is enormous, and that pressure is at its strongest exactly where the dynamics of Stage 2 and 3 (explained later) are strongest. A crowd in stage 2 attachment does not want a sceptic in the room. The sceptic is experienced as an attacker. So the views that need challenging the most are the hardest to challenge.

Being willing to ask, out loud, whether the emotional charge in a room is actually tracking anything real is a small civic service. Not because the sceptic is always right. Often they are not. But because the question itself slows the room down, and a slowed-down room is one stage lower on the scale.

The 2002 paper

In 2002, Lynn McCutcheon, Rense Lange, and James Houran published Conceptualization and measurement of celebrity worship in the British Journal of Psychology.^[1] They built the Celebrity Attitude Scale, a self-report instrument that picks up three increasingly extreme bands of attachment to a public figure. The scale was later refined^[2], and the same three-stage structure has held up across roughly two decades of follow-up work.

The three stages are not three distinct personality types. They form a continuum. A person can drift up the scale over time unknowingly, and most people who reach the top did not start there.

You like what the person makes. You enjoy their films, songs, matches, books, or speeches. You discuss them with friends. You might learn their life story because it is interesting. The relationship is intellectual and social. You draw inspiration from the work, and you can criticise the work without feeling personally attacked. This is healthy. Most people who like an artist or a cricketer sit here, and there is nothing to fix.

Stage 2: Intense-Personal

Now the bond turns emotional. You feel personally affected by the celebrity's wins and losses. You catch yourself thinking about them often. You start to feel that they understand you, that you have a soul-mate-like connection, even though you have never met. Both the highs and the lows hit harder than they should. The research finds that this band correlates with neuroticism and poorer mental health outcomes. The problem starts here, not in any single behaviour, but in the slow rewiring of where your sense of self comes from.

Stage 3: Borderline-Pathological

At the top of the scale, the boundary between the fan and the figure dissolves. The celebrity becomes part of your identity. An attack on them feels like an attack on you. You will argue, brigade, harass, and sometimes physically fight other fans on their behalf. You start to believe you have a special private relationship with someone who does not know you exist.

The research literature links this band to a cluster of traits that should give anyone pause. Higher scores on the Celebrity Attitude Scale correlate with narcissistic personality features, criminal tendencies, stalking behaviour, dissociation, cognitive rigidity, and psychoticism. The original 2002 paper mapped the three stages onto extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism respectively. Later work has filled in the rest of the picture, including the narcissism link, which has been replicated as recently as 2025 and 2026.

The honest reading of this is uncomfortable. People who already carry one or more of these traits have a much higher tendency to slide into stage 3 fandom in the first place. The fandom does not create the trait. It gives the trait somewhere to live.

Why current politics is a clean case study

Vijay's path from cinema to Chief Minister is the textbook version of how the three stages can stack at population scale. His Tamil fan clubs, which had been running for years as Stage 1 and Stage 2 communities, were converted into the on-ground machinery of Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam. The party won 108 seats in its first election, which in itself is a great achievement. Analysts have already pointed out that the campaign ran on mobilised fan affection more than on any worked-out ideology.

This is not a comment on whether Vijay will be a good Chief Minister. He could very well be and wish him the best for that. The DMK had its own corruption and anti-social elements, the AIADMK had its own troubles/fatigue, and a new option was overdue. That is a separate conversation.

The point is about how people are reasoning. If your reason to support a candidate is that you love his films and you want his films to keep winning, you have collapsed two different judgements into one. If the reason is to support a new campaigner, you need to be mindful not to fall into trap of the Stage 2. A vote cast from Stage 2 attachment is structurally the same vote whether the candidate turns out to be a reformer or a disaster. You did not actually evaluate him. You evaluated your feelings about him. Now is the time to let him work and validate the performance later with the same mindset with which you instilled him to power for genuine reasons, without falling into Stage 2.

The IPL fan bases show the same shape in a lower-stakes setting. Fans of two franchises will harass each other for weeks over a result that has zero bearing on their lives. The team is a corporate franchise that can be sold, rebranded, or relocated. The players rotate through auctions. None of it is the fan's, in any meaningful sense. But the identification is real, and at the top end of the scale it produces real aggression toward real strangers.

Similar observations can be made towards the orthdox religions & their followers.

What this is not

This is not an argument against liking things. Liking an artist, a player, or a politician is fine. Stage 1 is healthy and probably necessary for any thick public culture. Tamil cinema, IPL, and electoral politics all benefit from people who genuinely care.

This is an argument against letting the liking quietly upgrade itself into something else. The upgrade is rarely a decision. It is usually an emotional drift, helped along by social media feeds that reward the most intense version of any attachment. By the time someone is at Stage 3, asking them to step back feels to them like asking them to step out of their own skin.

The cheapest defence is to notice the drift in yourself early. If a public figure's win or loss has started to feel like your own win or loss, you are already at Stage 2. If you have started arguing with strangers online on their behalf, you are already in Stage 3. Neither stage is a moral failure. Both stages are worth catching.

The research has been sitting in the British Journal of Psychology for twenty-four years. It is not obscure. We just prefer not to look at it when we are the ones in the mirror.

Arun Chandrasekaran