Parasocial Relationship

What it is

The phrase names a bond with three features. It runs in one direction, because the media figure does not know the viewer. It builds over time, across many viewings and not within one. It is felt as closeness, in the way an acquaintance is felt, although nothing is exchanged in return. The phrase belongs to the family of ideas that began with Horton and Wohl's paper in the journal Psychiatry in 1956, whose subtitle, observations on intimacy at a distance, still serves as a short description of the whole field.

Researchers apply the phrase to television presenters, to celebrities and to fictional characters alike. David Giles, reviewing the literature in Media Psychology in 2002, found the concept widely used but thinly theorised. He listed three open questions: how the experience fits into ordinary social activity, how it differs between kinds of media figure, and which processes over time and media use create a parasocial relationship from a single encounter. He proposed a model that places parasocial interaction inside everyday social interaction instead of treating it as a separate kind of thing.

The most useful distinction in the later literature is between interaction and relationship. Jesse Dibble, Tilo Hartmann and a colleague argued in 2016 that the two ideas had been blurred, in how they were defined and in how they were measured. On their account parasocial interaction is a within-viewing experience of mutual awareness, and a parasocial relationship is the longer-running attachment. In an experiment with 383 participants, who watched a short video of a woman who either addressed the viewer directly or did not, the newer Experience of Parasocial Interaction Scale captured the in-the-moment experience better than the older PSI-Scale. The authors suggested the older scale may reflect longer-term liking, or something else, and urged researchers to choose measures with more care.

Riva Tukachinsky and Gayle Stever added a developmental account in Communication Theory in 2018. They built on a model of how relationships between people develop in stages and described the relational goals and parasocial interactions that belong to each stage, the variables that predict engagement at each stage and the outcomes of each. They also assessed how well existing measures capture those stages. Their framing treats a parasocial relationship as a dynamic process and not as a single feeling that varies only in intensity.

In effect

In research: the feeling of being addressed

Tilo Hartmann and a colleague introduced the Experience of Parasocial Interaction Scale in the Journal of Communication in 2011. Their experiment had 198 participants and varied whether a television performer addressed the viewer bodily, verbally, both or neither. Viewers reported a more intense parasocial experience when the performer addressed them both bodily and verbally. The experience was also stronger among viewers who rated the performer as more attractive and among viewers with greater ability to take another person's perspective. A stronger experience was linked to a greater commitment to social norms and to more enjoyment of the viewing situation. Only the address was manipulated, so the other results are associations.

In everyday viewing: from one programme to a long habit

Consider a viewer who watches a single programme once and a viewer who has followed the same presenter for years. The first may feel addressed during that hour, which is parasocial interaction in the sense used by Dibble and colleagues. The second has had many such hours, and the staged account of Tukachinsky and Stever is aimed at that second case. This example is an illustration of the distinction, not a reported case.

In commerce: credibility and purchase intention

Hanna Reinikainen and colleagues studied the bond inside influencer marketing in the Journal of Marketing Management in 2020. In an experiment, participants watched a YouTube vlog in which an influencer endorsed a brand, under two conditions of audience comments. A stronger parasocial relationship with the influencer went with higher perceived credibility, and the comments from other viewers changed how strongly that happened. Higher credibility in turn went with greater trust in the brand and greater intention to buy. Tim Wu, in The Attention Merchants, makes the same commercial point from the other direction: a performer who feels like an acquaintance holds an audience in a way a distant name does not.

What it does not say

The research described here concerns how the bond is produced, how it is measured and how it relates to viewing and brand attitudes. It does not assess health or wellbeing, and nothing on this page is health advice or a statement about any individual's circumstances.

Each study answers a narrower question than the phrase suggests. The 2011 and 2016 experiments used short videos and measured an experience during viewing, so they say little about a bond lasting years. The staged model of 2018 is a proposal for research. The 2020 experiment used one vlog format and measured purchase intention as reported in the experiment, which is different from sales.

The terms are also still being sorted. Because interaction and relationship have often been blurred, a reader meeting a claim about a parasocial relationship does well to ask whether it concerns a moment, an attachment or a commercial outcome.

Who developed it

The root term, para-social interaction, was introduced by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956. The distinction between interaction and relationship, and the developmental model, come from later researchers including Jesse Dibble, Tilo Hartmann, Riva Tukachinsky and Gayle Stever.

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