Donald Horton
Donald Horton is the co-author, with R. Richard Wohl, of the 1956 paper in the journal Psychiatry that introduced the term para-social interaction. Its subtitle, observations on intimacy at a distance, remains a compact description of the research field that followed.
Who they are
Horton's name is attached to this page through one paper. The paper appeared in Psychiatry in 1956 with Wohl as co-author, and its term has been taken up by media psychologists, communication researchers and marketing researchers since. This page rests on that one paper. His wider career, affiliations and other publications have not been checked against a source here, and no claim is made about them.
Key papers
Key ideas
What the 1956 paper introduced
The paper gave a name, para-social interaction, to the one-sided sense of closeness an audience member can feel toward a media performer. The subtitle frames it as intimacy at a distance. Tim Wu invokes the term in The Attention Merchants to explain why celebrity coverage works as a business.
How later researchers used the term
Giles reviewed the literature in 2002 and called for more theory. Hartmann and a colleague built a scale for the viewing experience in 2011. Dibble, Hartmann and a colleague separated the moment of interaction from the longer relationship in 2016. Tukachinsky and Stever proposed a staged account of how a relationship develops in 2018. Each of these builds on the term the 1956 paper introduced.
Sources
- Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). 'Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance.' Psychiatry, 19(3), 215-229. doi:10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049