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Parasocial Relationships

Chapter · November 2010

DOI: 10.1515/9783110232424.4.442

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 DAVID C. GILES

Parasocial Relationships

1 Introduction

I love Molly. The more I start to think about and analyze the depth of her mothering
for her own children and for Harry, the more overwhelmed with emotion I become. 1

I don’t think Snape has ever said anything untrue, or anything that did not happen or
was false, not about anyone. I don’t have any doubt about it. 2
In October 2007 author J.K. Rowling stunned millions of Harry Potter fans
by suggesting that one of her characters, without any overt indication in
the books, might be gay. Arguments raged among fans, some claiming
that it had been evident all along, and that Rowling had struck a blow for
gay pride, leaving others distraught that their image of Dumbledore,
presumably as heterosexual, or asexual at best, had been tarnished forever.
Leaving aside the questionable (or perhaps thrillingly postmodern) act
of an author publicly ›outing‹ her own characters and providing spurious
›backstory‹, this act of extra-textual revelation may have served to further
reinforce Potter readers’ impression that the characters on the page exist
as real, tangible people who play a meaningful part in their day-to-day
experience. By announcing that Dumbledore is ›really‹ gay, despite any
mention or suggestion of sexuality in the novels, Rowling was effectively
presenting Dumbledore as an authentic human being with a life beyond
the text.
Did Potter fans need Rowling to perform this act of validation? If we
study the above quotes, taken from two Harry Potter fan sites, it becomes
clear that Dumbledore is not the only ›real‹ entity emerging from the pages
_____________
1 <http://www.leakylounge.com> (Potter discussion forum).
2 <http://www.chamberofsecrets.com> (Potter discussion forum).
2 David C. Giles

of the books. The first fan ›loves‹ the character Molly and is ›over-
whelmed‹ by her behaviour; the second claims that Snape is unfailingly
honest, thus opening up a second layer of realism (for what has Snape got
to be honest about, other than things that never ›really happened‹?)
These quotes are typical of millions posted on fan sites throughout
cyberspace that refer to figures, real and imaginary, who have come to life
for the fans involved, where the amount of information, whether factual
or fictional, about the figures, have left in people’s minds an impression
they somehow know the figure, just as they know individuals in their
immediate social circles. Harry Potter, Prince Harry, Harry Hill… in the
imagination of the reader or viewer these distinctions blur. There are just
Harries, as real as Harry who lives next door; perhaps more real, since
they barely know Harry next door except to see him occasionally putting
out his rubbish.
In an urbanised, increasingly alienated society, these imaginary Harries
have become our social frame of reference. As James Caughey has argued,
any society has a cast of characters that its members are expected to know
about – whether spirits, leaders or media figures. 3 Such figures can act as
social ›glue‹, to provide common cultural ground among strangers. And it
does seem that we spend a good deal of our social interaction time
conversing about people we have never met, yet feel that we know. And
we spend yet more time privately, consuming media – watching television,
listening to the radio, reading newspapers – and reading books and
watching films, and surfing the internet. All these activities immerse us in
a virtual social network where we come to know faces, voices, bodies,
beliefs, opinions, ways of looking at the world, sometimes to a degree of
intimacy that might not even be possible with a romantic partner, let alone
Harry next door.
This phenomenon – a ›feeling of knowing‹ that comes from media use
or cultural activity – is something that most people identify with, at least
from an anecdotal point of view. We all seem to have a story about
running into someone famous, or at least someone we recognise through
the media, who at first strikes us as an old friend or colleague, until a
second or so’s reflection brings us to the realisation that he or she is
someone we have never before actually met in the flesh.
It happened to me once, when I was a student in the leafy Georgian
English town of Cheltenham, where the local cricket team, Gloucester-
shire, play an occasional match at the Boys’ college. I saw this portly
middle-aged gentleman looking slightly lost at the corner of the street by
the college cricket ground one summer evening, and at first took him to
_____________
3 Caughey: Imaginary.
 Parasocial Relationships 3

be a fellow university lecturer; but I couldn’t bring to mind his name, or

decide whether or not to greet him – standard split-second decisions we
all make in social situations of this sort.
Instead he approached me, and asked me in his West Country burr if I
knew of a hotel in the vicinity. Suddenly I realised where I knew him
from: he was a famous umpire, who had officiated in tests all over the
cricketing world, who I had watched on many occasions on television. He
had never seen me before in his life. I was a complete stranger to him.
And not much help either – I didn’t have a clue about local hotels. So
there we were, a famous cricket umpire and a budding psychologist with
poor local accommodation knowledge. We had a relationship, now, of
sorts, but we had had, unbeknown to him, a relationship of sorts for many
years. I like to describe this kind of one-way relationship as a parasocial
relationship.

2 Parasocial Interaction: The Research Literature

The concept of parasocial interaction has existed in communication and

media studies for several decades. The term was first coined back in the
1950s by sociologist Donald Horton and his psychiatrist co-author
Richard Wohl in a paper in a psychiatric journal. 4 The authors were
particularly interested in styles of radio broadcasting that had adopted the
›fireside‹ technique of presentation – so-called because the broadcaster’s
intention was to make the listener feel as if they were at home by the
fireside listening to an old friend talking. 5
During these broadcasts, Horton and Wohl argued, radio listeners
become drawn into an illusion of intimacy with the radio persona –
whether real or fictional – and may even experience the belief that they are
the recipient of a personal address (as intended by the producer). They
cited the example of ›The Lonesome Gal‹, a regular broadcast on US
network radio in the early 1950s, which featured a young woman with a
seductive voice addressing the listener as her lover, inviting ›him‹ to lie
down on the couch with her and have ›his‹ hair stroked. Evidently large
numbers of lonesome boys were captivated by this broadcast, because
thousands of letters subsequently arrived at the radio studio proposing
marriage. 6

_____________
4 Horton / Wohl: Mass.
5 Scannell: Radio, p. 19.
6 Horton / Wohl: Mass, p. 224.
4 David C. Giles

The authors were not content to present this as a temporary one-off

phenomenon, a quirk solely brought about by the advent of broadcasting.
They saw it as symptomatic of fundamental social needs in human beings
that had been brought to life by these new media. They explicitly
suggested a research programme emerging from their ideas.
It seems to us that it would be a most rewarding approach to such phenomena if one
could, from the viewpoint of an interactional social psychology, learn in detail how
these para-social interactions are integrated into the matrix of usual social activity. 7
In the fifty years that have passed since their paper, however, this research
programme is still not forthcoming. The development of the concept of
parasocial interaction has undergone periodic bursts without ever really
becoming an established topic in communication and media studies: in
psychology it is still largely unknown.
Communication research on parasocial phenomena emerged gradually
during the 1970s, when an American scholar, Mark Levy, developed a
psychometric scale in order to measure the strength of parasocial
interaction that existed between television viewers and their local
newscasters. 8 He assembled a series of statements about newscasters from
comments made in focus groups of local news viewers, for example ›I
compare my own ideas with those of newscasters‹, and ›When the
newscasters joke around with each other it makes the program easier to
watch‹. Then a sample of viewers were asked to rate each statement on a
Likert-type scale according to what extent they agreed, or disagreed, with
it.
This scale was picked up during the 1980s by a team of researchers at
Kent State University and, following a series of publications, turned into
an instrument – typically described as the Parasocial Interaction Scale –
that could be used to measure ›strength‹ of parasocial interaction. 9 In
subsequent research, variants of this scale were used to measure strength
of interaction with soap characters, comedians, TV shopping hosts and
general television personalities, 10 but few researchers actually oriented
their research towards the topic of parasocial behaviour. It became just one
quantitative ›variable‹ employed in a multivariate study with the aim of
predicting scores on another, more important, variable.
More recently, I published a review of the literature on parasocial
interaction in an attempt to generate some research that sought to address

_____________
7 Ibid., p. 229.
8 Levy: Watching.
9 Rubin / Perse / Powell: Audience.
10 Giles: Media, p. 189.
 Parasocial Relationships 5

the limitations in the current literature. 11 Some of my suggestions are

slowly being taken on board by other researchers, but it is notable that
there is a general reluctance to deal with parasocial interaction in any way
other than as a quantitative variable, with researchers unable or unwilling
to broaden the concept within scientific psychology, qualitative social
science, psychoanalytic theory, or any other academic discipline.
Meanwhile, a related phenomenon has emerged in the psychological
literature in the last decade – celebrity worship. Like parasocial interaction,
the study of celebrity worship has thus far been chained to the kitchen
sink of psychometrics, with the development of a scale – the Celebrity
Worship Scale – that first appeared in 2001 and has since inspired over 30
studies, 12 each of them a multivariate study with celebrity worship as a
predictor of some other variable of interest. I don’t really want to discuss
celebrity worship here, because it is a slightly controversial concept in its
own right. However, just to clear up a common confusion: parasocial
interaction is, occasionally, described as a form of celebrity worship.
However, if the concept of parasociality is to be any use to us at all, it has
to be the other way round: celebrity worship is a form, or subset, of the
broad and diverse behaviour known as parasocial interaction.

3 Limitations of Rresearch on Parasocial Interaction

Most communication and media scholars agree, I am sure, that the

concept of parasocial interaction is undeveloped, and has remained that
way simply because nobody has thought up methodologically acceptable
ways to develop it. I’m presently working on one, which I will describe at
relevant points here, but it’s not an easy task, largely because – as I
continue to argue – it is really the job of psychology to define the
parameters of parasocial behaviour, and psychology seems to have an
even bigger problem with the concept.
Let’s start by thinking about the parasocial relationship itself. For many
psychologists this kind of experience is not strictly speaking a relationship
at all, because all relationship theory is founded on the assumption of
reciprocity. Understandable, because applied psychology – clinical
psychology for example – is primarily concerned with the study of dyadic
relationships, or specified relationships like families or occupational work
groups. Even where interaction is conducted via the internet, we assume
reciprocity – if you kept e-mailing someone and never received a single
_____________
11 Giles: Parasocial.
12 Maltby et al.: The self-reported.
6 David C. Giles

reply you could hardly say that you and that person had a relationship.
After all, it could be that the e-mail address does not exist.
So the parasocial relationship is not like a social relationship, which is
why the term parasocial is used. This, however, leads people to assume
that the relationship must be ›imaginary‹, and that the person is
experiencing an illusion that the media figure is somehow involved in a
relationship with them – rather like the psychiatric syndrome ›erotomania‹
where people believe themselves to be sexually involved with a famous
person. 13 This interpretation of parasocial phenomena has alienated many
communication and media scholars from the broad concept, leading to
charges that it ›pathologises‹ media users. This is, I believe, an over-
reaction to a very limited conceptualisation of the phenomenon. For any
individual in modern society, parasocial relationships are experienced with
many thousands of media figures – real, fictional, perhaps even
nonhuman.
To some extent the problems with parasocial interaction arise from the
limited way in which the concept has been conceived, and explored, in the
literature. Most research involving parasocial phenomena has used the
parasocial interaction scale in some form or other, but the parasocial scale
usually measures only interaction with one chosen figure (typically ›my
favourite soap character‹ or whatever). This may be useful for the
purposes of a study with a broad interest in soap (where the researcher
might be primarily interested in what motivates viewers to prefer certain
characters), but as a global index of an individual’s parasocial life, it is of
course useless. It could even be argued that it is not much help in
understanding how individuals interact with soap characters. It is unlikely
that each respondent in the study will only have a meaningful relationship
with one character, or that they can even identify one single favourite
character (indeed, many studies measuring parasocial interaction fail to
gather information about respondents’ ›favourite‹ media figures).
Then a great deal of the literature on parasocial interaction defines it in
a very narrow fashion. Many researchers use the term to refer to the way
that television viewers (invariably television rather than media generally)
respond to the presence of a figure on the screen. Some of the items in
the parasocial interaction scale seem to invite this interpretation, for
example »When I’m watching the newscast, I feel as if I am part of their
group«, and »I sometimes make remarks to my favorite newscaster during
the newscast«, 14 which suggest that the viewer is responding to the figure
as if he or she were another person in the same physical space.
_____________
13 Franzini / Grossberg: Eccentric.
14 Rubin / Perse / Powell: Audience, p. 167.
 Parasocial Relationships 7

This is where communication research and psychological theory seem

to be at odds. A psychologist would, understandably, have little interest in
a concept that was restricted to behaviour performed by a television
viewer in the act of viewing, unless it had some kind of pathological
consequence (hence, I suspect, the objection made my media scholars
towards the parasocial concept itself). A communication scholar, being
primarily interested in soap per se, might not want to waste time
pondering the psychological ramifications of viewer behaviour, or to
categorise that behaviour in any wider context.
And yet, a number of researchers have since attempted to expand the
measurement of parasocial activity in general by creating new instruments.
Philip Auter developed the Audience-Persona Interaction Scale, 15 which
includes some similar items to the Rubin scale but also, importantly,
includes items relating to both similarity and wishful identication with the
media figure. Brown and Bocarnea have also developed instruments for
measuring parasocial interaction and identification, but as separate
constructs. 16 Holger Schramm and Tilo Hartmann have developed the
PSI-Process scale, 17 a more theoretically-informed measure of psychologi-
cal processes that occur during interaction with media figures.
It seems clear that researchers are now expanding the scope of paraso-
cial interaction, but at the same time, making important distinctions
between the cognitive, affective, and behavioural processes that take place
during the media encounter, and the longer-term psychological processes
that influence the development of parasocial relationships with media
figures. It is plainly nonsensical to view media figures as temporary
phenomena whose existence is only meaningful while they are being
watched on the screen. This reductionism stems from ›media effects‹
research where phenomena like ›media violence‹ are treated as experimen-
tal stimuli, abstracted from their narrative context and presented in an
artificial environment. Media figures enter at multiple levels in our day-to-
day lives. A celebrity is watched on TV, heard on radio, read about in
newspapers and magazines, interacted with virtually, discussed with peers,
and so on.
Hartmann et al describe the parasocial relationship as »an enduring
mental relational schema fueled by parasocial interactions that are
conducted during media exposure«. 18 In other words, repeated encounters
shape and modify the initial schema over time, particularly in relation to

_____________
15 Auter / Palmgreen: Development.
16 Brown / Bocarnea: Celebrity-Persona; Bocarnea/Brown: Celebrity-Persona.
17 Schramm / Hartmann: The PSI-Process.
18 Hartmann / Stuke / Daschmann: Positive, p. 26.
8 David C. Giles

affective evaluations (do I like the figure?) Unusually, these researchers

incorporate the possibility that these relationships are not necessarily
positive, which marks an important break from the long-established focus
on ›favourite‹ celebrities, characters, and so on. At what precise point an
interaction develops into a relationship, is a question that remains
unanswered as yet.
There remains also the problem of measurement. Hartmann et al., in
their most recent work on parasocial relationships with racing drivers, 19
used a number of items from existing parasocial scales that captured
affective aspects of the relationship. However, the idiographic perspective
– focusing on the multiple ›schemas‹ each of us holds in relation to a vast
range of media figures – may be harder to capture. Nevertheless, this
should not prevent researchers from addressing the question. In
personality research, there is a move back towards the idiographic
approach: 20 it would be interesting to see if this could be applied to
relationship (and parasocial relationship) theory too.
Qualitative researchers might not even see the measurement issue as
problematic. After all, who cares about designing instruments and
measuring relationship ›strength‹ if you want to fully understand the
experience of parasocial interaction, or explore what meanings a broad
range of media figures hold for media users? You might also want to
broaden the scope of parasocial interaction beyond the experiences of
individuals, and explore the way in which media figures are incorporated
into the social activities of groups – as discussion material, or points of
comparison, yardsticks by which other individuals are judged. All these
research questions require the collection of rich qualitative data: they are
simply beyond the scope of reliable psychometric scaling.

4 Avenues for Further Exploration of Parasocial Phenomena

The remainder of this chapter will be rather speculative, I’m afraid, but it
simply reflects the fact that the research hasn’t been done: we are still
awaiting serious developments in this field. Nonetheless I will mention,
where relevant, ongoing research that is seeking to push some of the
boundaries of the parasocial concept.

_____________
19 Ibid.
20 Cervone: Architecture.
 Parasocial Relationships 9

4.1 Parasocial Interaction and the Internet

Developments in parasocial research have been further complicated by

the arrival of the internet. It is frustrating that a medium with such a
potentially profound impact (as the internet) has appeared before media
psychology has really emerged as an academic discipline. Instead of
moving swiftly ahead with a set of established theories about the
relationship between media and psychology, we have entered the Internet
age still speculating about this relationship; meanwhile, a multitude of
theories about the Internet have appeared without any reference to
traditional media at all. The result: an even greater diversity of research
than before.
I have seen, very occasionally, online relationships described as
›parasocial‹. This is of course a misunderstanding of the concept of
parasociality (however defined). An online relationship, for example a
cyber-romance set in motion via a dating website, consists of two
individuals interacting in a reciprocal fashion, sending and receiving
emails, texts, or whatever. The only way in which this differs from any
other kind of social relationship is that the interaction is not face-to-face.
There is actually nothing very new about this kind of interaction. People
have been communicating over long distances by letter for centuries, by
telephone for decades, without necessarily ever meeting in person. There
has always been an identity puzzle to solve (is the person whose letter I’m
reading the same person as in the photo they’ve inserted?) Of course the
internet has made this type of relationship easier to come by, but cyber-
relationships are perhaps less interesting and revolutionary than cyber-
enthusiasts sometimes make out.
Parasocial relationships, while enjoying a long history, are entirely
different. The defining feature of a parasocial relationship is that the
communication is all one-way. Of course we can have parasocial
interaction online, but if the e-mail I send to my favourite newscaster is
responded to by my favourite newscaster, then it is no longer parasocial –
it is a relationship like any other, whether ›cyber‹ or epistolary (I could have
sent my favourite newscaster a letter in 1950 and received a letter in
response – the difference is simply one of medium).
But the real issue, now as ever, is whether the response really has
emanated from my favourite newscaster rather than a proxy of some sort.
Some research in progress on the nature of parasocial interaction online
has explored whether fan interaction on fan websites is truly parasocial. It
is a good question. Many fan websites have forums in which the celebrity
or artist communicates directly with fans. I have heard of fans recounting
10 David C. Giles

excitedly the message ›they‹ received from their hero in response to

something posted on a message board.
Naturally the technology of the internet has made it easier for celebri-
ties and other media figures to make personal contact with their fans.
Once upon a time, Clark Gable (or whoever) could only do this by a)
making a personal appearance; or b) sitting down with his PA and signing,
or actually typing or handwriting, a pile of letters. Of course a) is still a
frequent fan club activity. But I find it hard to imagine b) occurring with
any regularity in pre-Internet history.
Today, however, the modern day Clark Gables can log on, from the
comfort of their Hollywood mansion, Hawaii hotel suite, or studio lounge,
and reply to any number of interesting-looking fan e-mails or forum posts.
They don’t even need a PA to sift through them. Indeed it may be quite
an enjoyable part of modern celebrity life to browse through your cyber-
mail and identify quirky or stimulating messages sent by quirky or
stimulating fans. Since one of the most irksome features of celebrity is the
loss of control over your popularity (inviting interest from unattractive as
well as attractive individuals), 21 the Internet is a godsend in this respect.
Where does this leave online parasocial interaction? Undoubtedly it
problematises the concept – at least with certain, easily accessible media
figures, such as artists, musicians, actors, celebrities. But as I will go on to
explain in the next section, these are only a subset of the figures with
whom we can have parasocial relationships.

4.2 Parasocial Relationships with Different Types of Media Figure

One of the most important qualities of parasocial interaction, and one of

its most fascinating features, is that it pushes the boundaries of logic and
rationalism. This of course runs the risk of researchers ›pathologising‹
individuals who have parasocial relationships that are themselves highly
illogical (with figures who are dead, fictional, or nonhuman in form).
However, on the contrary, I think it is essential that parasocial interaction
is normalised in the sense that its definition incorporates all these unusual
relationships as well as the ones that have been conceptualised in most of
the communication research (with ostensibly ›real‹, tangible, and frankly
not very interesting figures like newscasters).
In my theoretical 2002 paper I argued that parasocial interaction should
be conceptualised as one end of a continuum of potential encounters between

_____________
21 Giles: Illusions.
 Parasocial Relationships 11

two individuals. 22 At the other end of this continuum I placed a face-to-

face encounter between two single individuals – let’s say a conventional
dinner date. Of course there’s nothing remotely ›potential‹ about this
encounter. It’s undoubtedly happening here and now. The potential is in
the outcome of the relationship: for our daters anything is possible – sex,
reproduction, eternal union.
Further down the continuum, things become more speculative. The
encounter may take place in a much more ambiguous context, such as a
lecturer giving a class to 100 students, of which you are just one in the
crowd. Not very intimate, but outside the lecture hall it is nonetheless
theoretically possible for you to enter into a sexual relationship with the
lecturer! Ditto a singer performing live to a concert hall audience. Or the
encounter takes place remotely, in which case the actual nature of the
individuals involved becomes more important. If your lecturer phones you
up then it suddenly becomes much more intimate. If it’s your favourite
singer on the other end of the phone you really are in luck.
Things only start to get really interesting once we reach the other end
of the continuum. Here the remoteness of the encounter is such that
intimacy becomes very difficult to conceive: watching your favourite
singer on television introduces all manner of doubt as to his or her reality:
maybe the performance is recorded, maybe it’s someone else masquerad-
ing as your favourite singer (although this is, to some extent, applicable to
the live performance too), but you are also in a potential audience of
millions. Not so intimate.
Then we must consider the role of other figures. Dinner dates,
lecturers, singers are all individuals with whom we can – to a greater or
lesser extent – consider potential mates, or at least potential friends. But
there are a host of media figures for whom this potential is lacking. If your
favourite singer is Elvis Presley the chances of him calling you up are
slender. James Bond may be your idea of the perfect sexual partner. Harry
Potter might seem like your potential best friend. Or Bart or Lisa
Simpson. But in each of these cases the potential outcome of your
relationship is extremely limited; it is restricted to the parasocial encounter
and nothing more.
Bringing fictional and nonhuman figures into the scope of parasocial
activity is nothing new – the parasocial interaction scale has been used to
measure strength of interaction with soap characters, for example. 23 But
the parasocial concept still lacks any theoretical framework to account for
their lack of reality status. As the previous section on online interaction
_____________
22 Giles: Parasocial.
23 Rubin / Perse: Audience.
12 David C. Giles

suggests, this distinction has become more important with the advent of
the Internet and the increased potential access to real-life media figures.
When Harry Potter replies to a fan post, there is no ambiguity as to his
reality status.
The distinction of different levels of parasocial interaction was the
cornerstone of my 2002 paper. 24 The model identified three levels: real
(newscasters, celebrities, etc), fictional human (soap characters, human
protagonists of novels or films), and fictional nonhuman (cartoon or
fantasy characters, animals). In recent research I have been attempting to
identify differences between parasocial interaction with these figures. It
hasn’t been easy. The only variable which seems really to identify the
different levels is an extreme one: reactions to the envisaged death of the
figure. I asked respondents to select ›least favourite‹ figures from each
level. While most respondents were happy to see their least favourite
fictional nonhuman character meet a messy end, they were less keen to see
their least favourite real figure die. However much they might dislike
Victoria Beckham, the dislike doesn’t really extend to seeing her dead. But
for most other parasocial activity, reality status seems (at this stage in the
project) to have very little impact.
These findings suggest that parasocial interaction with fictional figures
shares a common basis with any other kind of parasocial activity, at least
while we are content to maintain the relationship at a parasocial level (and
not making strenuous attempts to make contact with the figure, in which
case we enter the world of fan activity, which is not quite the same thing).
Recent research on narrative engagement and realism points the way
forward for a theoretical framework that ought to underpin much of the
future research on parasocial phenomena. Busselle and Bilandzic argue
that there are two types of realism that influence our engagement with
narratives. 25 One is external realism – the degree to which the elements of
stories reflect our real world experiences (setting, character, action). The
other is narrative realism – the plausibility and coherence of the story itself.
Through our engagement with this aspect of stories, we are effectively
›transported‹ into narratives to an extent that we lose awareness of the
external world. 26
How does this work in terms of parasocial interaction? The power of
narrative realism may be sufficient to overcome the lack of reality status of
the media figures – so we respond to fictional characters at the same level
as real people. There is plenty of evidence that this happens, and not just
_____________
24 Giles: Parasocial.
25 Busselle / Bilandzic: Fictionality.
26 Green / Brock / Kaufman: Understanding.
 Parasocial Relationships 13

during the act of viewing – for example, soap actors being chastised by
members of the public for the moral failings of their characters. 27
Narrative realism may account for the similarity of responses in our own
research towards celebrities and cartoon characters.
It might also account for our complex relationships with figures that
transcend the media that they appear in. Harry Potter is one: we know
him as a literary protagonist and as a film character. The latter representa-
tion has of course coloured the former: for many people Potter is
indistinguishable from the actor who plays him.
James Bond is an even more complicated example, because not only
does he have parallel representations in written fiction and film, he has
been represented in film by such a variety of different actors that we have
all had, over time, to re-examine our relationship with him (the same
applies, albeit largely in a visual context, with the British TV figure Dr
Who). Only the narrative is left for us to engage with, and yet we
undoubtedly enjoy – to a greater or lesser extent – parasocial relationships
with Bond and Potter.

5 Final Thoughts

Ultimately, parasocial interaction is about encountering a figure through a

medium and then treating that figure as if it were another human being. We don’t
need to say anything, or ›behave‹ overtly in any particular way, but we
need to respond, albeit in a purely cognitive fashion, to the figure as we
might respond to a human in an ordinary social encounter. When that
figure is a real human being, such as our local newscaster, the response is
perhaps logical; when it is a fictional creation, or a nonhuman or dead
figure, the response is illogical. But that is not the same as saying it is
pathological.
The common framework for all parasocial phenomena should therefore
be the narrative context. Parasocial interaction takes place because the
figures are encountered in a narrative context that makes a ›humane‹
response a logical one. We cry at the end of a sad film because the
narrative has somehow seduced us into treating the characters as real
people. We are concerned about the fate of the protagonist in a novel
because the narrative has imbued that figure with realistic human qualities
which have seduced us into believing in his or her reality. We sympathise

_____________
27 Tal-Or / Pepirman: Fundamental.
14 David C. Giles

with the fate of our favourite member of the Simpson family because the
narrative context of the cartoon enables us to make these parallels.
In addition to the persuasive power of narrative we have to consider
some potential individual differences. One such possibility is that of
anthropomorphism. It is possible that some individuals have a tendency
to anthropomorphise more than others – children who are able to bring
dolls, teddy bears, puppets and possibly imaginary friends to life (albeit in
a well-organised narrative context), adults who can become as attached to
pet animals as to humans. This possibility forms part of my current
ongoing research programme.
One thing is certain however: the phenomenon of parasocial activity is
far more interesting than it has been conceived so far in the academic
literature. I hope that in writing this chapter I can stimulate someone,
somewhere, to take up some of the themes as a serious research project.

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