Research on parasocial ties has shown that PSRs can satisfy our affective, behavioural, and cognitive needs similarly to traditional bidirectional friendships 2: they make us feel less lonely 3, influence our purchasing decisions 4, and we even assimilate their body traits to the self 5. For non-fictional people (e.g., newscasters and celebrities), online technology provides unprecedented insights that make us perceive them as friends, even though they will never experience our self-disclosing as we experience theirs. For fictional targets (e.g., book characters), reciprocation would be impossible.
In these PSRs, we get to know targets who unidirectionally disclose information to masses of viewers, in ways that cannot be meaningfully returned. We often build them with real or fictional figures that we never directly interact with, such as television characters and celebrities. These one-sided psychological bonds are called parasocial relationships (PSRs) 1. We constantly form connections with people who are unaware of our existence, and they influence how we behave. Our results support the parasocial contact hypothesis and provide an organic method to passively reduce prejudice on a large scale. Preliminary findings suggest that this lower prejudice is sustained over time. We corroborated these effects through causal analyses, where lower prejudice levels were mediated by the strength of parasocial bond. Our intervention successfully reduced explicit prejudice and intergroup anxiety. We assessed whether parasocial interventions reduce prejudice towards people with mental health issues by first creating a new PSR with a YouTube creator disclosing their experiences with borderline personality disorder. However, previous studies have shown inconsistent success.
Parasocial relationships (PSRs) might navigate these problems by reaching large audiences with minimal resources and have been shown to help reduce prejudice in an extended version of contact theory. Intergroup contact has long been established as a way to reduce prejudice among society, but in-person interventions can be resource intensive and limited in reach.
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