Calling All Love Island Fans! Scientists Have Some Excellent News For You

ITV’s Love Island is without a doubt the show of the summer, with over two million viewers tuning in every night to see random guys and gals hook up and break-up in a lavish Spanish villa.

The aim of the game is for singletons to date their co-islanders in the hope of finding love – not to mention the hope of winning the £50,000 jackpot at the end.

Famous for its trashy sex scenes and drama, the show itself isn’t particularly complicated. However, new research shows that fans of Love Island are actually highly intelligent.

According to a study published in the journal Poetics, people who watch it are well-educated and watch the goings-on because they enjoy the irony and are interested in the different culture. The same goes for badly made movies, it seems.

Author Keyvan Sarkhosh at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, said, “At first glance, it seems paradoxical that someone should deliberately watch badly made, embarrassing, and sometimes even disturbing films and take pleasure in them.

“To such viewers, [trashy TV and movies] are an interesting and welcome deviation from the mainstream fare. We are dealing here with an audience with above-average education, which one could describe as ‘cultural omnivores’.”

There’s never been a better excuse to indulge in reality TV.