Robin Williams found dead in his Bay Area Home...

[Jenny A]

It's kind of strange how much we care about celebrities. I don't mean to sound cold or anything, but this is somebody that literally none of us knew at all.

I think this is simply an artifact of evolution. We have empathy for people we know. Statistics of those dying of plague, holocaust, or famine somewhere far away don't move us nearly as much as the neighbor girl's car crash. But if we know the story of a single famine victim, it pulls our heart strings. We care about the death of celebrities, because we know their faces and something about their stories--making them everyone's next door neighbor. We are wrong in thinking we know them of course. But that doesn't change the empathy one bit.