From Beatlemania to “Bennifer’s” Obsession: The Psychology of Parasocial Relationships

If the isolation of the pandemic has taught us anything, it is how much we depend on our relationships to get through the day. Locked up with just video calls and fantasy to help us the boundaries between “real” and imaginary connections are increasingly non-existent. As a result, some people ended up crossing to parasocial domain, a parallel world where one-sided relationships with celebrities or fictional characters have all the intensity of a reciprocal relationship.

These links, although formally articulated for the first time in 1956, they have existed where humans have been able to create “intimacy at a distance”. Recent research reveals that parasocial relationships can shape everything from what we buy and who we vote for to how we feel every day. It is not an illusion.

In 1956, sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl describes for the first time an interesting phenomenon that has occurred among the American public: viewers formed “parasocial relationships” (PSR), or “the illusion of a face-to-face”, with artists, movie characters, radio personalities or even characters from a book.

In dialogue with Infobae, Maximiliano Martínez Donaire, psychoanalyst and former scientific secretary of the Senate of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, explained: “Our relational world is not only made up of concrete and real others with whom we have daily and face-to-face relationships, but also the audiences we reach through the media are part of our social life or other means and which acquire a reference value ”.

Parasocial relationships extending the social network in a way that negates the possibility of rejection and allows people to mold and identify with whoever they choose that naturally elicit an empathetic response. For some, the one-sided nature of the relationship is a relief from strained complementary relationships in your real life. The media cultivates parasocial relationships to resemble face-to-face relationships.

Despite the unilateral nature of these relations, there are many similarities between these relationships and more traditional social relationships. Studies show that theParasocial relationships are voluntary, provide companionship, and are influenced by social attraction. In addition, viewers experience connection with the media user and express feelings of affection, gratitude, nostalgia, encouragement and loyalty towards them.

In fact, in general, parasocial relationships are almost entirely beneficial. Research has shown that These one-way connections can help put people at ease, especially with young people who are discovering their identity and those with low self-esteem.

“People with low self-esteem they can use their parasocial relationships to see themselves more positively, just like people with high self-esteem do with their “real” social relationships “, holds Jaye L. Derrick, associate professor of student psychology PSR at the University of Houston. “A parasocial relationship is safe”, Explain. “Your favorite celebrity can’t come out of a magazine article to reject you.”

Historically, parasocial relationships were considered to be pathological and a symptom of loneliness, isolation and social anxiety. However, one study found that there was no correlation between loneliness and the intensity of viewers’ parasocial relationships with on-screen characters. Other research has reduced the stigma of such relationships and has led clinicians to believe that such relationships can expand rather than restrict one’s social network.

The projection She is also involved in these types of links. When we are deeply invested in a celebrity or an athlete, what they were before the celebrity, their professional ups and downs, even their love life, we often project ourselves on them; they turn into ambitious figures, substitutes for our hopes, our dreams and our expectations for our own life.

“It is inevitable that a subject will take other people as a reference and give them that status. It should not be limited to that. You could say that somehow there is an interior search more or less conscious of another which serves as reference, model, leadership and which lends itself to idealization. If we were to look for the root of this phenomenon, I think we should think about when we are little and our parents occupy that place. When we are children, we believe that our parents are super powerful, the ones who dictate what reality is and how it is organized. When we grow up, this figure of omnipotent parents collapses and they get closer to ordinary people. Inside, it is painful for the subject and remains a vestige of rediscovering this idealizable other who will organize reality and serve as a guide ”, added Martinez Donaire.

People with parasocial relationships are often They express their gratitude to their favorite characters for helping them through difficult times. Additionally, some viewers perceive people to significantly shape their own identities. The support provided by parasocial relationships is of substantial value to the viewers who participate, And with new social media techniques, these relationships are a viable way to expand people’s social media.

While many parasocial attachments take on a crushing quality (fans obsessed with New Kids on the Block in the ’80s or K-Pop boy groups today), for Shira Gabriel, associate professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo who studies these types of connections, this is not always the case.

It’s not just women who are grabbing it. “We discovered that women are more likely to have them with celebrities, but men have them too ”, indicated Gabriel. “In my lab, we discovered that men often have it with superheroes”.

Too There are real benefits to these superhero ties. While you might think that comparing yourself to a comically empowered actor in a stiff and intimidating superhero costume might make you feel self-conscious about your own male body, it’s actually quite the opposite. A study has shown that being in love with a superhero actually increases men’s body image and makes them stronger. (Men who did not have such superhero attachments felt relatively bad about their appearance.) “This type of parasocial bond they’re so normal that most people don’t even call them parasocial relationships ”, assures Gabriel. “These guys don’t think they have a relationship with this person or character even though they really do.”

“Since we attach particular value to another, this other is already part of our inner world as a character with whom we are in a relationship, regardless of whether or not there is a concrete and real relationship with it. This other can be an artist, a leader, a leader, an athlete, an artist or someone who we think knows a lot of things, any situation that makes us deposit a potential relationship in the other. This generality can be manifested with different nuances. It is not the same as someone who entertains us or someone who seems to us to be an intellectual benchmark. There is some modes of presentation of these public figures who favor more the idea of ​​a relationship ”, Tenuous Martinez Donaire.

same we may have a parasocial attachment to a celebrity or fictional character that we cannot stand. According to Riva Tukachinsky Forster, assistant professor of the Chapman University in California who studies media psychology and has written a book on parasocial relationships, “We can ‘love and hate’ a celebrity or a character and find that we can’t stop reading about or seeing them.”

Fandom and Parasocial Relationships: Ancient History

Clearly, these parasocial links are nothing new. We are much more exposed to it because of the way people express their interests on social media. In his book, Toukachinski Forster said the PSR date back to Roman antiquity (1-2 AD), with people obsessed with the celebrities of their time, like actors and rhetoricians. Then, of course, there is the example of God.

“The human brain probably evolved at a time when people really needed social connections to survive,” he says. Gabriel. “We are not physically strong like other leading predators, so to survive, people had to live in groups ”.

To have a primitive mechanism that pushes us to form close bonds with people. In our current stage of evolution, this mechanism doesn’t differentiate between real relationships and those we learn from through movies, TV shows, or the internet (like influencers, YouTubers, or podcasters who, frankly, we would be missing if they disconnected).

“When we form a parasocial bond with someone, we feel like we really know them. We logically know no, but our primitive brain does not realize it, so the feeling is real. So it’s really difficult when they do something that doesn’t correspond to what we know about them, ”concludes the PSR specialist.

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