Parasocial interaction
Parasocial interaction refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.
A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona, becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification. Positive information learned about the media persona results in increased attraction, and the relationship progresses. Parasocial relationships are enhanced due to trust and self-disclosure provided by the media persona.
Media users are loyal and feel directly connected to the persona, much as they are connected to their close friends, by observing and interpreting their appearance, gestures, voice, conversation, and conduct. Media personas have a significant amount of influence over media users, positive or negative, informing the way that they perceive certain topics or even their purchasing habits. Studies involving longitudinal effects of parasocial interactions on children are still relatively new, according to developmental psychologist Sandra L. Calvert.
Social media introduces additional opportunities for parasocial relationships to intensify because it provides more opportunities for intimate, reciprocal, and frequent interactions between the user and persona. These virtual interactions may involve commenting, following, liking, or direct messaging. The consistency in which the persona appears could also lead to a more intimate perception in the eyes of the user.
Evolution of the term
Parasocial interaction was first described from the perspective of media and communication studies. In 1956, Horton and Wohl explored the different interactions between mass media users and media figures and determined the existence of a parasocial relationship, where the user acts as though they are involved in a typical social relationship. However, parasocial interaction existed before mass media, when a person would establish a bond with political figures, gods or even spirits.Since then, the term has been adopted by psychologists in furthering their studies of the social relationships that emerge between consumers of mass media and the figures they see represented there. Horton and Wohl suggested that for most people, parasocial interactions with personae complement their current social interactions, while also suggesting that there are some individuals who exhibit extreme parasociality, or they substitute parasocial interactions for actual social interactions. Perse and Rubin contested this view, finding that parasocial interactions occurred as a natural byproduct of time spent with media figures.
Although the concept originated from a psychological topic, extensive research of PSI has been performed in the area of mass communication with manifold results. Psychologists began to show their interest in the concept in the 1980s, and researchers began to develop the concept extensively within the field of communication science. Many important questions about social psychology were raised concerning the nature of these relationships that are problematic for existing theories in those fields. The concept of parasocial interaction and detailed examination of the behavioral phenomena that it seeks to explain have considerable potential for developing psychological theory.
The conceptual development of parasocial interaction and parasocial relationship are interpreted and employed in different ways in various literatures. When it is applied in the use-and-gratifications approaches, the two concepts are typically treated interchangeably, with regard primarily to a special type of "interpersonal involvement" with media figures that includes different phenomena such as interaction and identification. In contrast to the U&G approaches, research domains such as media psychology and semiotics argue for a clear distinction between the terms.
PSI specifically means the "one-sided process of media person perception during media exposure", whereas PSR stands for "a cross-situational relationship that a viewer or user holds to a media person, which includes specific cognitive and affective components". Schmid & Klimmt further argue that PSI and PSR are progressive states such that what begins as a PSI has the potential to become a PSR. Dibble, Hartmann and Rosaen suggest that a PSR can develop without a PSI occurring, such as when the characters do not make a direct connection with the viewer.
In sum, the terms, definitions, and models explicating PSI and PSR differ across scientific backgrounds and traditions. For example, Dibble et al. argued that PSI and PSR are often "conflated conceptually and methodologically". To test their assertion, they tested for parasocial indicators with two different scales used for parasocial inquiry: the traditional PSI-Scale and the newer EPSI-Scale, and compared results between the two.
The traditional PSI-Scale, along with modified forms of it, is the most widely used measure of PSI assessment. However, Dibble et al. found evidence supporting their hypothesis that the newer EPSI-Scale was a better measure of PSIs and that the traditional scale merely revealed participants' liking of characters. Because of varying conceptions, it is difficult for researchers to reach a consensus.
Scientific research
Studying social interaction, and by extension parasocial interaction, follows a social cognitive approach to defining individual cognitive activity. Accordingly, there are similar psychological processes at work in both parasocial relationships and face-to-face interactions. However, the parasocial relationship does not follow the process of the typical long-term relationship. The media user remains a stranger to the media figure, whereas this "strangeness" would gradually evaporate in typical social interaction.Many parasocial relationships fulfill the needs of typical social interaction, but potentially reward insecurity. Many who possess a dismissive attachment style to others may find the one-sided interaction to be preferable in lieu of dealing with others, while those who experience anxiety from typical interactions may find comfort in the lives of celebrities consistently being present. Additionally, whatever a celebrity or online figure may do can provoke emotional responses from their audiences—some even going as far as suffering from negative feelings because of it.
The research of PSI obtained significant interest after the advent of the uses and gratifications approach to mass communication research in the early 1970s. A study of early soap opera identified two essential functions of PSI: companionship and personal identity. Rosengren and Windahl further argued that PSI could be identified in the process of viewers' interacting with media figures, but such interaction did not produce identification. This is an important distinction, because identification has a longer history than PSI. Subsequent research has indicated that PSI is evident when identification is not present.
File:Teri Garr with David Letterman.jpg|thumb|David Letterman interviewing Teri Garr on Late Night with David Letterman in 1982. Television viewers may develop parasocial relationships with celebrities or presenters seen on television.
During the last several decades, PSI has been documented in the research analyzing the relationship between audience members and television newscasters, TV and radio talk-show hosts, sitcom characters and other TV celebrities or performers. Research has also been conducted on how a favorable PSI can be facilitated between celebrities and their followers on social media, specifically through the interactions followers have with the celebrities' posts on social media. Although different PSI scales have been employed in these studies, PSI was clearly documented with each persona.
Noticing the importance of media in the area of psychological research, academic David Giles asserted in his 2002 paper that there is a need for PSI research to move away from the field of mass communication and into the field of psychology. Studies in this area are commonly conducted by focusing a key psychological issue for PSI: concerning the similarity between parasocial relations and ordinary social relations. For example, academic John Turner adopted the idea of homophily to examine the interpersonal and psychological predictors of parasocial interaction with television performers. The author found that one dimension of homophily was the best predictor of parasocial interaction.
Hataway indicated that although there seems to be prevailing to analyze PSI in the domain of social psychology, a solid connection to psychological theory and developmental theory has been missing. Hataway further suggested that more psychological research is needed in order to develop parasocial theory. Specific issues cited were "how parasocial relationships are derived from parasocial interaction and the way those relationships further influence media usage as well as a social construction of reality, and how parasocial interaction is cognitively produced". He saw that the majority of PSI research has been conducted by mass communication scholars as a weakness and called for psychologists to refer to Giles's 2002 paper for directions of studies.
Another important consideration for the study of PSI at a psychological level is that there is a form of PSI existing even in interpersonal social situation. People may use fundamentally the same cognitive processes in both interpersonal and mediated communication. Giles's 2002 paper also suggested that the element of direct interaction occurred in mediated interaction, such as talking to a presenter or celebrity guest, may continue in social interaction, with a cartoon character or a fictional protagonist in the mind. This may finally constitute a new way of interpreting social interaction. A further consideration is application of social cognitive approaches in individual levels. It is traditionally accepted that this approach is inadequate by itself for the study of relationships.
However, a growing literature on the role of imagination in social interaction suggests that some imaginative activity may be an influential factor in the outcome of real social interaction. PSI is nowadays regarded as an extension of normal social cognition, specifically in terms of the use of the imagination. Current PSI literature commonly acknowledge that the psychological processes acting at the individual level parallel those used in ordinary social activity and relationship building.