When dreaming is believing: Extending the findings to favorite celebrities

Abstract

Building on the findings of Morewedge and Norton (2009) we hypothesized and found that our 157 college participants selected the Freudian interpretation of dreams over three other interpretations as the one most likely to be true. We also hypothesized that participants randomly assigned to read a brief script of a positive-, compared to a negative-imaginary dream about their favorite celebrity would score higher on meaningfulness of the dream. We found marginal support for this hypothesis.  As predicted, participants who selected the Freudian interpretation of dreams as “most true” did score higher on a scale designed to measure meaningfulness of the imaginary dream about their favorite celebrity than those participants who selected any of the other theories of dream interpretation. Contrary to our prediction, participants randomly assigned to read a brief script of a positive-, compared to a negative-imaginary dream about their favorite celebrity did not score higher on the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS).  Participants who selected the Freudian interpretation of dreams as “most true” scored higher on the CAS than those participants who selected any of the other theories of dream interpretation. Discussion focused on the extension of Morewedge and Norton’s (2009) findings on motivated interpretation of dreams beyond the realm of social relationships to parasocial relationships, specifically to dreaming about celebrities.