Fame has much less to do with intrinsic quality than we believe it does, and much more to do with the characteristics of the people among whom fame spreads.

But most importantly, [the experiment] highlights the role of imitation. The next time you listen to Justin Bieber, and wonder, “Why?” remember that global success has more to do with social imitation than anything else. We have an extraordinary ability and drive to replicate each other’s physical actions and mental processes. Copying is a fundamental part of how we learn, it gives us social cohesion, and it signals group affiliation. It is so pervasive that small moments of mimicry can fall outside of our attention, allowing us to misattribute fame. The origin of global fame is primarily the ability of a given system to allow the faithful copying of a given message.

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We humans are storytelling and story-finding machines: homo narrativus, if you will. In making sense of the world, we look for the shapes of meaningful narratives in everything. Even in science, we enjoy mathematical equations and algorithms because they are a kind of universal story. Fluids—the oceans and atmosphere, the blood in your body, honey—all flow according to a single, beautiful set of equations called the Navier-Stokes equations.

In our everyday, human stories, far away from science, we have a limited (if generous) capacity to entertain randomness—we are certainly not homo probabilisticus. Too many coincidences in a movie or book will render it unbelievable and unpalatable. We would think to ourselves, “that would never happen in real life!” This skews our stories. We tend to find or create story threads where there are none. While it can sometimes be useful to err on the side of causality, the fact remains that our tendency toward teleological explanations often oversteps the evidence.

We also instinctively build our stories around individuals.

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But social groups are far more complicated than any individual story. Networked, distributed, conflicting, and changing, they do not simply map onto an individual. For this reason, it’s unnatural and very difficult to put ourselves into the collective minds of groups. Even a group of two is too much—we have to side with one person or switch between points of view. We are embodied stories of one.

So, when we discuss groups, we are left without metaphor. What do we do as a result? We force our single-body stories onto them: Groups become one dominant person—a monarch, the President, Michael Jordan—plus a supporting cast.

These two traits—our compulsion to tell stories, and our bias towards the individual—conspire to ruin our intuitive understanding of fame. They cause us to believe that fame is earned, that it is the result of the intrinsic properties of the famous person or object. 

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/07/nobody_whos_famous_deserves_to_be_partner/