Study: Taylor Swift’s most devoted fans more likely to rationalize her jet emissions

Young adults who strongly identify as Taylor Swift fans were more likely to make excuses for the singer’s private-jet carbon emissions. Those excuses were tied to weaker concern about carbon dioxide and fewer stated intentions to take climate-friendly actions themselves, according to a new study in the journal Psychology of Popular Media.

The research team included Leah Dajches of New Mexico State University, Taylor A. Foerster of Oregon State University, Juliana L. Barbati of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Jessica Gall Myrick of Good Pug Media. They recruited about 1,000 undergraduates ages 18 to 29 at two U.S. public universities. Participants first completed a survey measuring how strongly they identified as Swift fans. They were then randomly assigned one of three mock news stories: one about celebrity carbon footprints in general, one that named Ms. Swift and cited data on her jet use, and an unrelated control.

Reading about Ms. Swift’s emissions did not, on its own, produce statistically significant differences in environmental concern across the whole group. The effect appeared among the most devoted fans. Those who read the Swift-specific story reported the highest levels of rationalization, meaning excuses or claims that the behavior wasn’t so bad. Rationalization, in turn, was linked to lower concern about carbon dioxide and weaker intentions to act on climate.

Fan identity alone was associated with higher environmental concern. The researchers also tested “decoupling,” in which people separate a celebrity’s conduct from their view of the celebrity’s work.

The study’s focus on Ms. Swift traces to a July 2022 analysis by the marketing firm Yard, which used public flight-tracking data to rank celebrity jets by emissions. Yard put Swift’s jet at 8,293.54 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over roughly seven months of 2022, or about 1,185 times an average person’s annual emissions. The firm acknowledged it could not tell whether the celebrities were aboard the flights.

Ms. Swift’s representatives pushed back. A spokesperson told Entertainment Tonight that her jet “is loaned out regularly to other individuals” and that attributing most or all of the trips to her was “blatantly incorrect.” Yard later revised its method to account for each jet’s fuel consumption. That lowered Ms. Swift’s estimate to about 2,971.5 metric tons, though she still ranked first.

The authors cautioned that the findings may not generalize. Participants were mostly white, heterosexual, cisgender women at universities who leaned Democratic. The experiment covered only Ms. Swift, and it did not measure whether participants already knew about her jet use. The researchers also dropped one moral-reasoning measure, “coupling,” because their survey questions for it were not reliable.