Disturbing Stat of the Day

I held out for many years, but I've finally been taken down by the reality TV bug. Really, is there anything better than "I Want to Look Like a High School Cheerleader Again"? (Ok, maybe "Girl Meets Cowboy".)

So I was more than happy to gobble up this N.Y.T. piece on the rise of Tila Tequila. (If you haven't heard of her, that's ok, but she does have one of the most successful shows on MTV and over 1.7 million (!!!) MySpace friends. The premise of the show, called "A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila," is that 32 men and women compete for some bisexual loving from Tequila.) But the real nugget of the N.Y.T. story was a reference to a study on fame-obsession which found that

31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)

I would love to read the actual study but couldn't find a link for it. It was unearthed by Jake Halpern during research for his book "Fame Junkies."

UPDATE
Halpern has kindly forwarded me some information on the two studies. Here are two excerpts from his book:

Perhaps the single most compelling piece of evidence to support this theory comes from a study conducted by Dr. Cassandra Newsom at the Virginia Consortium Program in Clinical Psychology. Newsom analyzed results of a personality test known as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory or the MMPI. She compared test results taken from teenagers in the early 1950s and compared them to others taken from teenagers in the late 1980s. One of the most striking differences between these two groups was the way that they responded to item #58, which reads: "I am important person." In the early 1950s only 12% of teenagers endorsed that statement; by the late 1980s, that number had jumped almost seven-fold, to roughly 80%.

According to a Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University survey conducted in May of 2005, 31% of American teenagers believe that they will become famous one day.

Here is the Kaiser survey, Newsom's paper unfortunately is behind a pay wall.