Logically speaking, we shouldn’t be interested in this kind of tabloid speculation. The inner lives of celebrities like Jolie and Pitt have next to nothing to do with us, after all: we’re unlikely ever to meet them, and their romantic relationships have no bearing on how our own lives unravel, down here in the ‘real world’.

And yet we are interested. The celebrity gossip industry was worth $3bn a year in 2011, according to the New York Times, and most of us are at least slightly fascinated by this sort of mad tabloid speculation – even if we’re reluctant to admit it.

But why? What purpose does gossip serve? What function is it fulfilling in our collective psyches? Put simply, why do we care?

Listen and learn

One explanation for our fascination with the lives of celebrities is that human beings are, as a species, obsessed with stories of all kinds. Whether they’re factual, fictional, or (like most celebrity gossip) somewhere in-between, it’s through stories that we learn about and make sense of the world. In his book The Moral Animal, Robert Wright observes that the themes of the tales we’re most gripped by – “who is sleeping with whom, who is angry at whom, who cheated whom”, and so on – tend to line up “with the sorts of information conducive to fitness”.

Psychologist Dr Hamira Riaz, who specialises in the concept of success, agrees. “We learn lessons about the human condition through storytelling, and [Jolie and Pitt’s] is one of the biggest stories of our time,” she tells Stylist.co.uk. “It has all the elements of myth-making, of a fairy tale: the most beautiful man marrying the most beautiful woman.”