#Tattle tale game show celebrities series#
There were homeless folks in the area who went to Tattletales tapings and made enough money to eat for a few days and there were merchants located around CBS who put up signs that said, “We cash Tattletales checks.”īert Convy was the host of this series that ran from February of 1974 to March of ’78, then returned to the air in January of ’82 and ran ’til June of 1984 - not a bad run and there was a syndicated version, as well.
So if you went and sat through the taping of a few episodes, you might take home twenty bucks - not a huge amount, but twenty bucks more than any other show paid you to sit there and applaud. Each “rooting section” had 122 people in it, and the winning celebrity couple’s section might split around $1200 while the losing couples might each have earned $300-$400 for their section. The show paid off then and there: As audience members left, they were handed a check from an automatic check-writing machine. The audience was divided in thirds and each celebrity couple was playing for one segment of the audience, which would divide up the celebs’ winnings. In this new version, three celebrity couples competed to see who knew the most about his or her mate. It’s not simply schadenfreude, Peng and his team point out, because the stories in this study were not of bad things happening to stars, but of the stars doing bad things to others.Tattletales evolved out of an earlier Goodson-Todman game show called He Said, She Said. But that still doesn’t tell us why tittle-tattle about celebs’ misdemeanors is especially captivating. Psychologists have suggested that negative gossip in general grabs our attention because it would have had survival value in the past. Of course, what the brain imaging data can’t tell us is why stories of celebrities getting up to mischief are so much fun to hear. I’m guessing that people here might not see the pleasure of negative celebrity gossip as being a bad thing to own up to, in which case you wouldn’t expect to see the mismatch between subjective ratings and brain activity. It would be interesting to run this set up with participants in the West. With their vision blurred by Eye of the Scorpion hot sauce, the contestants have to pair celebrities with their famous exes. They conducted some extra clever analyses combining data from lots of previous research on the likely function of the caudate nucleus, and, based on this, they concluded that the likelihood of the caudate activity in their study reflecting increased pleasure was “moderately strong”, and so their inference about the meaning of this activity “may be defensible” they said.
Stated differently – why should we trust the brain data and not the students’ subjective ratings? To their credit, the researchers led by Xiaozhe Peng were alert to this issue. This evidence does require caution because it involves a logical step known as “reverse inference” – that is, interpreting the activity in reward-related brain regions based on what previous research has suggested is the function of those brain regions. The gossip was in the form of a description of something good or bad the target person had done – such as helping people to find their missing children, or driving under the influence and crashing a car. Infoboxtelevision showname Tattletales caption Tattletales title logo. The set up was simple: the students, 17 of them, each lay in a brain scanner and listened to a woman read sentences of gossip about either the student him or herself about one of their best friends or about a celebrity (one of two Chinese film stars for whom the participants said they had no special interest). I’m usually skeptical about this kind of study, but this one is pretty interesting because the brain activity patterns were inconsistent with the behavioral data. That’s what a group of Chinese researchers have done for a paper just published in the journal Social Neuroscience. The shows premise involved questions asked about celebrity couples. You have to measure an aspect of human behavior in the brain scanner to show it’s the case scientifically. Tattletales is an American game show which first aired on the CBS daytime schedule. But these days, such truisms aren’t enough. Whether it’s Justin Beiber crashing his car or Kanye having another Grammys tantrum, celebrity gossip is always in the news.