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Key points
- In evolutionary terms, the human brain is wired to process media-based people as if they were real.
- Many media consumers form deep, albeit imaginary relationships with media figures.
- Even social relationships have fanciful components, similar to parasocial relationships with media figures.
One of the eight finalists for the 2023 Oxford Word of the Year, alongside “Swiftie” and “rizz” was “parasocial”—the sense of relationship, even though it is one-sided, between a media consumer and the characters they see on the screen. These experiences probably have been around ever since people enjoyed entertainment (a satire from ancient Rome pokes jokes at women’s celebrity crushes on actors and rhetoricians), but the scientific term to describe these experiences entered the popular discourse only in recent years.
No doubt, audience members can have strong feelings towards others they have never met in person. Mostly happy and rewarding, these relationships often involve watching shows or movies featuring that media figure, spending some time on social media learning about them, and interacting with other fans. However, like in real-life relationships, things can get tough.
Last October, many individuals were crushed with grief at the loss of their good parasocial friend Matthew Perry. Moreover, with feelings of possessive love also comes parasocial jealousy. For example, in 2016, Justin Bieber resorted to shutting down his social media presence to shield himself from hatred from fans who could not accept his romantic relationship with his wife, Hailey. How can some media users become so deeply and profoundly involved with media personalities we do not really know? How can people care about them so much?
The answer is that the line between real and unreal is much fuzzier than it appears. During the first years of their lives, children may believe that Sesame Street exists someplace in the world and its inhabitants continue to socialize, sleep, and eat offscreen between episodes when the TV is off. Some children may even think cartoon characters physically reside inside the device playing the show.
By elementary school, children outgrow these beliefs and understand that fictional characters do not exist. As adults, we know that actors pretend to be the characters they play for money; that celebrities carefully curate their media presence in a way that may not reflect who they actually are; and even though influencers create the illusion of eye contact, directly address viewers and even respond to some of their followers’ comments, we know they do not really know their audiences and do not actually speak to any individual viewer personally.
Right?
While this is true for most, a closer look suggests that psychology plays tricks on us.
Media representation of reality is a relatively new phenomenon in evolutionary terms. The human brain has not evolved (yet?) to process media representations differently from how it is wired to process real things in our actual environment. Put simply, from an evolutionary perspective, it is advantageous for us to overreact when we see a snake on the TV screen and have an instant adrenaline rush even though the image is completely safe, then to idly deliberate if this is an actual snake or a harmless image of one before responding appropriately. And so, just like we grimace in disgust when we see pictures of open wounds on “Grey’s Anatomy,” we are predisposed to react to attractive and fun people in the media the way we would respond to them if we were to encounter them in person.
Moreover, to enjoy media, we have to suspend our knowledge of its “unrealness” and submit to the belief that the fictional world is real. There is an unwritten contract between the viewer and the media. In theater, we accept that the set design is minimal and that a 40-year-old woman is a teenage Juliette. However, in scripted film and television, the implicit contract presumes that the fictional worlds are real, and we find it hard to forgive when this contract is violated. This is why viewers gladly accept a fictional reality in a fantasy TV show in which dragons roam, but many of these same viewers were outraged when a Starbucks cup is visible in the shot.
To sum up, humans are wired to see people in the media as real, blurring the lines between the actors and the characters they play, the celebrities and the real people they are off the screen, and viewers forming relationships that are psychologically real, even if they are imaginary and one-sided. There are ample examples of these blurring lines. Many actors have lamented suffering consequences for their fictional character’s actions.
Back in her days as an actress playing Rachel on the TV show “Suits”, Meghan Markle received hate mail from viewers admonishing her for the affair that Rachel had onscreen with a married character. Some actors, like Tom Felton, resented that the public would not disassociate him from the evil character he was famous for playing—Draco Malfoy.
Viewers know that actors just do their work and recite lines written by someone else for them, yet, research shows, they still expect consistency between the actor’s personal belief and the actions of the characters the actor plays. In an interview with my colleague, Gayle Stever, for her upcoming book, an actor confirmed that he feels that the audience expects him to be the character, and when he sees fans at conventions, he is compelled to act as the character rather than be himself, thereby continuing to propagate this mix of reality and fiction.
Several experiments demonstrated just how much reality and fiction are inseparable in our minds. In one study, students watched a beloved actress in a fictional movie. Then, they saw her appear as herself in an ad soliciting support for a children’s hospital. All the participants saw the exact same ad; however, half of the participants watched her as a likable fictional character whereas the other half watched her play the role of a villainess. “She is so caring,” “she is such a great person,” “the commercial is so moving!” said those who saw the commercial after watching the actress playing a likable character. Conversely, those who saw the actress playing the villain role first were more likely to say that the commercial was “cheesy,” the actress is “disingenuous,” and she did it merely as a publicity stunt. The attributes of the fictional character tinted their perceptions of the actress herself, weakened their parasocial relationship with the actress and made them less receptive to her charity work.
The effect goes the other way around too. Another study showed that just as viewers project some of the character’s attributes onto the actor, media users also apply their prior knowledge of the actor to make sense of the characters they play.
To make things more complicated, our real-life relationships with people also have somewhat “unreal” or fanciful aspects. For example, it can be said that a sixth grader who has a crush on an eighth grader whom she has never spoken to engages in a somewhat parasocial relationship. Even in close relationships, certain aspects of our friends and romantic partners are based on how we imagine that person. We love and relate to a fantasy of that person. The real-unreal is not a hard line but a continuum.
When thinking of fandom and parasocial relationships, for many the first examples that come to mind are celebrity stalkers who appear to take the parasocial relationship too far. However, those are rare, extreme cases of individuals with an underlying mental condition that compromises their ability to differentiate between reality and their imagination. In those rare cases, it is not that the parasocial relationship derailed, but the person’s mental condition happened to manifest in this particular context.
It is helpful to remember that the basic tendency to respond to media-based people as “real” is natural, healthy, and commonplace. It is an integral aspect of humans as social beings that enjoy relating to others even if in a one-sided, fanciful manner.
References
Chandler, D. (1997). Children's understanding of what is ‘real’ on television: A review of the literature. Journal of Educational Media, 23(1), 65-80.
Davies, M. M. (2013). Fake, fact, and fantasy: Children's interpretations of television reality. Routledge.
Koban, K., Rumi, M., Pöschl, M., & Ohler, P. (2021). Seeing characters in a different light: Psychological consequences of actor–character mismatches for viewers’ involvement in fictitious characters. Psychology of Popular Media, 10(3), 393.
Tukachinsky, R. (2020). Playing a bad character but endorsing a good cause: Actor-character fundamental attribution error and persuasion. Communication Reports, 33(1), 1-13.
Tukachinksy, R. (2015). When actors don’t walk the talk: Parasocial relationships moderate the effect of actor-character incongruence. International Journal of Communication, 9, 17.
