Kim Mills: Have you ever had a crush on someone you knew only through TV or the movies? Maybe it was a famous actor or a singer, or even a fictional character. If so, you’re not alone. Yes, researchers have studied this phenomenon and they found the majority of adults say that they have had a celebrity crush.
These one-sided emotional attachments are just one example of a parasocial relationship. More broadly, parasocial relationships are the relationships that people have with media figures, whether they’re actors, celebrity influencers, or television characters. These kinds of relationships sometimes get a bad rap. Remember the film Misery in which Kathy Bates’s character proclaims to the novelist played by James Caan, “I’m your number one fan”? And we know how that turned out.
But psychologists who study parasocial relationships say that they can be good for us. They can help us expand our worldview and have positive effects on our mental health and well-being. So how is a parasocial relationship different from simply being a fan? Can these relationships give us any benefits of real life friendships? Can they alleviate loneliness? What happens when a parasocial relationship goes sour? When your favorite character or your celebrity crush disappoints you? Or even worse, how do these usually harmless relationships become obsessions? And how are these relationships changing now that social media gives us constant access to celebrities lives?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
We have two guests today. First is Dr. Rebecca Tukachinsky Forster, an associate professor in the school of communication at Chapman University. She studies parasocial relationships and how people develop long-lasting, meaningful connections with media figures. She’s particularly interested in how parasocial romantic relationships develop and how they affect us. Dr. Tukachinsky Forster is editor of the Oxford Handbook of Parasocial Experiences, published this year by Oxford University Press, and author of the book Parasocial Romantic Relationships: Falling In Love With Media Figures.
Next is Dr. Karen Dill-Shackleford, a professor in the Department of Media Psychology at Fielding Graduate University. She’s a social psychologist who studies pop culture and media in all its forms, particularly how being a fan or consumer of popular culture fiction affects people’s well-being, empowerment, and positive belief change. She’s editor of APA’s journal Psychology of Popular Media.
Welcome to you both.
Dill-Shackleford: Thank you. Great to be here.
Tukachinsky Forster: Thank you for having us. So excited.
Mills: Let’s start with a definition. What are parasocial relationships and more specifically, how are they different from just being a fan of a celebrity or someone famous or prominent?
Tukachinsky Forster: Well, parasocial relationships is this—you described it so well. It’s this feeling of intimacy, of knowing that media personality, that—maybe it’s a news anchor or a host of a television show that you see every day or once a week, and it can be a fictional character, someone that by virtue of being exposed to them over and over and hearing about their self-disclosure, about their personal lives, you become like friends with them, or develop other types of relationships with them that are one-sided. They’re imaginary, but they are as real possibly for the person that experiences them.
It’s kind of interesting to contrast it to fandoms. First of all, fandom is not necessarily about a personality. You can be a fan of a show, for example, without feeling affiliation with any particular character on that show. But also fandom is when something becomes an integral part of your identity, when it becomes an important part of who you are and your self-definition. So I would say some parasocial relationships are more like an acquaintance or a friend, but it’s not rising to the level of being a fan. Some researchers also talk about the distinction between parasocial relationships as—you look at the media personality as your peer or maybe a super peer, but someone that is a down to earth person. Whereas fandom is, you put that other celebrity or media personality on a pedestal and you are worshiping them, you are admiring them. So in some ways they are the exact opposite of the down to earth person that you feel like you’re having over for dinner.
Dill-Shackleford: And this is all in a continuum that might be called audience involvement. So we’re all the audience of various media forms, film, television, video games, and audience involvement means the different ways that we connect to the characters themselves in fiction or the actors who portray them, or media personalities.
So identification is one of those factors. And identification is when you feel like you’re merging with the other person. That sort of feeling through the character when you’re watching a show and you cry because the person is disappointed or has a loss, and you feel like you’ve experienced some different things than you’ve ever experienced in your life, maybe even being someone with a different race or sexual orientation or from a different part of the world or time period. So there’s lots of ways we can connect, parasocial being one of them.
And the way I distinguish it as a social psychologist is that the identification part is when you feel like it’s you. And the parasocial part is when you distinguish that it’s another person. And I want to emphasize that we move through those different connections seamlessly. I’m sure you’ve experienced when you’re watching a film, you might be feeling what the character’s feeling and feeling all those emotions. And then the next second you think, I love that actor, that actor is so talented. Or then you could be thinking, I think I have a crush on that actor. So you might just take these different lenses and pop through them. So they’re not mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re correlated with each other.
Mills: Well, Dr. Tukachinsky Forster, let me ask you, do you think parasocial relationships are more common than they used to be? Because celebrities now share so much of themselves via social media. I mean, they’re really brands and they have to put themselves out there.
Tukachinsky Forster: Definitely there is a change in our culture in how parasocial relationships are experienced and expressed, and definitely facilitating parasocial relationships is part of the industry of the entertainment industry, of how they market themselves. But that’s how it’s been for several generations. In fact, from the golden years of Hollywood, when if you think historically, originally in the movie industry, the marketing of movies did not depend at all on the actors. In fact, sometimes the actors were unnamed. In fact, some people were embarrassed to work in the movie industry and wouldn’t want to go by their real name anywhere. But people nonetheless started developing those parasocial relationships and wanted to, craved connection to those media stars and actually put pressure on Hollywood to release the names of the actors. So that created a shift in how movies are marketed, and it became the standard for us. And maybe now we are doing more of that in direct ways, like the actors have a way to, or celebrities have a way of directly reaching audiences through social media, for example.
But this craving for a connection from afar was there for the longest while. And ultimately, parasocial relationships are imaginary. Relationships are about what happens in the person’s mind, and therefore they don’t necessarily need this reciprocity or illusion of reciprocity to cultivate this relationship as much.
So what I’m trying to say is that, tell someone who was a Beatles fan in the 1960s, that therefore a social relationship is lesser than a fan of Justin Bieber because they didn’t follow them on Instagram. It was as real and as potent, and it just was expressed in a different way. You had to actually go and see them and sit in line. And that’s different from today. You just sit and watch a live stream of someone else sitting there for you and live streaming it. So the expressions of the relationship are maybe different, but I think fundamentally, fundamentally, it’s something that we’ve been doing for a long time.
Mills: But now I understand that the term parasocial relationship was coined in the 1950s by these two researchers, Donald Horton and our Richard Wall, and that was in reference to these imaginary one-side engagements that audiences had with media personalities. But couldn’t you argue that parasocial relationships go back much further in culture? For example, could you see a relationship that an ancient Greek or Roman had with a god as a parasocial relationship?
Dill-Shackleford: Yes. I like to think about those things myself—anytime that it’s not interactive like that, you could think of it as a parasocial relationship. Like Dr. Forster mentions in her book, if you’re a lecturer in a psychology hall, your student could have what’s called arguably a parasocial relationship with you, or any character in a book like a child carrying a doll of a figure that’s in a book. So stories and books that date back in time like that or experiencing something one-to-many like that. Those could be parasocial relationships.
Tukachinsky Forster: For my first book I was researching for examples and the first example of a celebrity crush I could find dates back to ancient Rome where you have the example of women developing crushes on rhetoricians or actors in the theater. So those definitely existed.
And then to follow up on what Karen was saying, you can think of a continuum of social to parasocial. So in a way, all of our social relationships have some imaginary aspects. Like you are running those conversations, you are rehearsing your conversation with your spouse. You are anticipating their reaction. In a situation where you have an auditorium of 300 students and the professor doesn’t have a personal relationship with many of those students. The sixth grader that has a crush on the seventh grader she never spoke to, but she only sees from the other side of the cafeteria. So all of those are social relationships, but they have some imaginary aspect to them. And in a way, relationships with media personalities are just an extreme example of that. And they too can become social if they evolve, if you start having real reciprocity in interactions, if the celebrity starts responding to you personally on your comments on Instagram, or if you are waiting at the meet and greet and you start developing a conversation and end up being picked from the crowd and marry the rock star.
Dill-Shackleford: You know what, I have an example of this, maybe you’ll need to edit this out, but I was at the British Museum last summer and there was an exhibit on women in art and a statue of a goddess. I think it was Minerva, but they said that people try to literally make love to the statue because they thought they were in love with Minerva. This goddess, so is a goddess that different, is Minerva that different from a beautiful starlet of today?
Mills: Yeah, that’s interesting. Well, getting back to today’s world, the surgeon general has said that we’re in a loneliness epidemic right now, and there’s been a lot of discussion recently about how we’re missing close friendships in our real lives. Do parasocial relationships give people any of the psychological benefits of a real friendship, or do they actually maybe increase loneliness?
Dill-Shackleford: Well, I would recommend the work of Shira Gabriel who talks about things like going back to the concept of collective effervescence—that when you go to a cafe, for example, you’re sitting in a coffee shop and other people are around and you’re sort of, the effervescence is the sort of bubbles from the sociality of the situation. So just being around other people. And so if you turned on Parks and Recreation or The Office, you would be soaking in that sociality. And yeah, she talks about social surrogacy, that we have the feeling of being around other people. And part of the parasocial equation that we haven’t really mentioned yet is that in some ways it’s less demanding and more pleasurable. People aren’t going to be mad at us, we’re not going to get into trouble. We sort of know what to expect. And it’s fun to hang around fun people who are telling jokes or beautiful people.
So yeah, it’s not to say though that I think—sometimes the stereotype is people with parasocial relationships don’t have friends or don’t know how to talk to real people. And of course that’s not true. As you mentioned, it’s very, very common. I’m not a clinician, but I suppose it does slip into those things. I’ve heard clinicians say that sometimes people identify with the character so much that they imagine they are the character, people they’re seeing in therapy. Or of course we hear stories about people stalking or showing up at people’s houses. But I credit Gail Stevers with saying in print, the first time I ever read it, that is sort of the reaction that a lot of people have to this topic. But in reality, the middle of the normal distribution is people like you and me who might admire someone, but we’re not having pathological problems with it. We’re just feeling a connection.
Tukachinsky Forster: Another aspect I wanted to add to that is that research doesn’t necessarily find a correlation between the intensity of the parasocial relationships that people experience and their level of loneliness. For the longest while the research in this area was driven by the substitution hypothesis or compensation hypothesis, the idea that people who are lonely in the real life seek out media friends because they don’t have real friends. And you try to see whether people who have social deficits, people who have what we call insecure attachment style, people who can’t form and relate to others, people who are shy, so individuals that we expect to have problems creating friendships, will they be more prone to developing parasocial relationships? And there is no consistent evidence of that. What we do see is that those who are more prone to forming friendships and relating to others in social life are also more likely to engage in parasocial relationships.
So people who have a secure attachment, people who are anxious and clingy, like insecure, they’re also that crave connection. They’re also the ones that create connection to characters. So we see essentially that it’s the same way we process real relationships or social relationships is also how we process parasocial relationships. So parasocial relationships are just an extension of our social ties, and it could be that part of what we’re seeing is that people who are lonely do want more parasocial relationships, but then parasocial relationships make them feel less lonely, and it becomes that it kind of washes out that effect. So that’s also a possibility. And we do know that in challenging situations where people are socially isolated, for example, there is great research that’s come out now looking at lockdown during COVID at the beginning of COVID. And especially for example, individuals who feel more isolated and more vulnerable, like LGBTQ youth, that maybe don’t have access to their regular community and support group, they turn more to parasocial relationships because that’s something that can enrich their social more limited world in a given point in time.
Mills: I was just going to say that brings me to this question, which is that you’ve both written about the importance of parasocial relationships with media figures can have for members of underrepresented or stigmatized groups. What about people who are not LGBTQ, but other underrepresented groups?
Dill-Shackleford: Well, I might mention a study I did about Black Panther being watched by youth of color. And in the study being exposed to Black Panther made people feel more self-efficacy, and we can understand that so easily. We’re given a vision of African people thriving and a place of pride in that film, despite people who didn’t believe that a film with primarily Black characters would do so well, it’s just soared to the top and made so many, broken so many glass ceilings, so to speak. So I think of that as the inspiration of how things could be, and it’s great to see on the screen how things could be. And that’s of course true for us as women. When I was young, I felt like so many of my role models were boys and I could adjust and say they could have been girls, but I would’ve liked them to actually be girls or women so that I could witness that happening.
And one of my students, Kristin Hopper-Losenicky, did a dissertation on STEM role models for women who work in stem. And they had real life role models, grandmothers, mothers and other people, but they also had media role models like the character from Bones or other people who are scientists in the media. And I have to admit, I love to see a woman scientist in the media. I love to see that we have non-traditional careers, maybe they’re becoming more traditional. I watch a lot of old movies and it never fails. There’s a woman astronaut and everyone’s hitting on her and they just think she’s there to be pretty or to date instead of, and I’m sure smart women listening to this understand that you think, oh my gosh, you’re thinking of me in that stereotypical way, but not as a peer, a scientist, a thinker. And it feels good to watch someone be portrayed in good ways like that.
Tukachinsky Forster: And I want to stress the importance of it, not just from the perspective of the member of the marginalized group, but also how important it is for advancing the intergroup relationships from the perspective of the members of the dominant group. So a lot of the animosity between groups is driven by just not knowing, that we tend in segregated spaces surrounded by people similar to oneself and not having opportunities for positive experiences, firsthand experiences with people outside of that group. So media is a window into that world through something we call parasocial contact. So both directly observing and learning about someone from another group, another culture, another background. It reduces those anxieties and negative stereotypes, but also by modeling a positive intergroup interaction and experience. So for example, a show like Will and Grace, I’m bringing another LGBTQ example, but it could be just as true, and it has been shown for shows depicting African-Americans that you, so just seeing someone who is like yourself, who is White, if you’re a White member of the audience or cisgender and straight interacting with an outgroup character, be it an ethnic minority or be it LGBTQ character, it gives you a model to follow in terms by forming a parasocial relationship with an ingroup that has a friendship with outgroup, it kind of expands your social network and improves your intergroup relationships.
Mills: I want to pull new technology into the discussion. These days Siri or Alexa can be a big part of people’s lives. Can an interaction with a chatbot or another AI system become a kind of parasocial relationship?
Dill-Shackleford: I think so. I liked to joke during the pandemic that Alexa was my new BFF, I would have conversations with her all the time. She gives me information. And this goes back to the work of Clifford Nass and others. We really like to impute consciousness onto things. And so it’s easy to impute consciousness when you have an actual voice of a person that’s been recorded and she’s friendly, and so it feels like she’s real. So I don’t know what the difference between that—there’s people who are real, like Barack Obama, there are people who feel real like Alexa, they don’t actually have a body, and there’s actors. So yeah, it could take many forms.
Mills: Well, what do you foresee happening as AI and robots become more prevalent in our society? Are we in danger of developing potentially harmful relationships with what are basically machines, but as they become more human-like?
Dill-Shackleford: Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI lately and working on some stuff in AI. And one thing that I would point out is that AI is not separate from humanity because it takes a person to program them. So I think people might even sometimes visualize a cold metal robot that’s a single entity carrying out activities when it’s really people who are programmers, programming what humans know about things.
But of course, there’s almost endless things that we could be concerned about that they might have advantages and disadvantages. So someone was just telling me recently about creating the voice of someone that you love who has passed away, taking their voice and making an AI out of that, and that you could have them respond to you as that person would have responded. And on the one hand, I think a lot of us would find that comforting in that when we’ve lost someone, there’s no way to know what they would say in a new situation that would be priceless.
But then of course there could be risks associated with that. I could imagine a husband loses a wife and is spending time with her AI. So gosh, there’s just so many facets of this. I try not to careen wildly to either we’re all going to die or it’s the best thing ever. With media, it’s so easy to do that, but it’s more that it’s just nuanced and we have to think through these things and it’s coming at us fast, and that kind of makes us scared sometimes.
Mills: Yeah. Well, let me ask you, Dr. Tukachinsky Forster, there’s a stereotype that teenagers have really intense celebrity crushes. Is that backed up by the research on parasocial relationships, whether they’re romantic or not, strongest or most important when we’re young?
Tukachinsky Forster: That’s a great question. So there is definitely a stereotype that especially about celebrity crashes, that it’s something that is a teenage girl thing to do—specifically girl. And it is probably true that the most potent crushes happen to teenagers in general, not just parasocial. It’s that stage developmentally. And those crashes, just like other romantic relationships that happen around those years, are very important. Those celebrity crashes are also very important. In psychology in general there was a tendency to dismiss those young relationships because “you only need to study marriage because that’s the important thing.” And then about 20 years ago, there came this big realization that no, those relationships are very important and formative. And I will just add that our parasocial relationships in those ages are also very important and informative. But it’s not to say that they don’t happen later in life or that they’re not important later in life.
What my research suggests is that they become particularly important in transitional points. For example, for romantic parasocial relationships, I observed in women that undergo crisis related to their identity or through their romantic identity and their sexuality, for example, with the transition into motherhood or after the dissolution of their marriage or losing a spouse. So overcoming those big life events that make them ask and reconsider again who they are, re-engaging in a romantic or sexual relationship after some period of time of being outside of that. For example, again, mourning over dissolution of a relationship, losing a spouse or shifting back into finding back your romantic self after becoming a parent for the first time. So those are very important ones. They happen later in life for parasocial friendships as well. We know that they are very important in childhood. They’re very important. They will be serving different purposes and different points in people’s lives.
Mills: How early in life can these relationships develop? Do little kids have parasocial relationships with Sesame Street characters or Bluey? And if kids have an imaginary friend, is that a kind of parasocial relationship?
Tukachinsky Forster: So young children definitely have parasocial relationship. We see that from surveys of parents from around the age of two onwards. And those parasocial relationships can be very instrumental in advancing learning. So you can use them to harvest the benefits of learning from positive characters like those Sesame Street characters or Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, show the educational content. So we know that you can, for example, give kids stickers and action toys and all of those things that will promote this fantasy play and mental time spent with those characters to foster their parasocial relationships and harvest the benefits for learning. But that also has the flip side that if you don’t approve of that character, if you don’t want your child to be friends with that character, then don’t encourage that. Don’t encourage those parasocial relationships either.
Dill-Shackleford: And Jonathan Cohen wrote about identifying with media characters as an integral part of a child’s development. So maybe first we identify with our parents and caregivers, and then maybe we identify with some media figures. And again, these different ways of connecting to characters, there can be multiple ways. So we’ve all seen a child pretend to be a superhero tying a towel around their shoulders, for instance. And so they’re pretending to be the character or identifying with the character, but then they admire the character as another person as well. Maybe they go to a show and see Elmo Live or something like that. People can make those transitions to “I want to be like them. I feel like I’ve done that thing, or they’re really cool and I admire them.”
But it’s just our inherent sociality that of course, we look at people who are interesting and we say, do I want to be like them? Do I want to grow up and be an architect, a builder or someone like this? Do I want to be a forensic person? And people, there’s data that people who watch someone on television in a certain career might want to be more likely to pursue that career. So it’s just really multifaceted.
And I think most of us can identify with this because we’ve done it ourselves. I identify with Harry Potter, and so every time I’m faced with a certain conundrum, I think, well, I remember when Harry Potter was 11 and he did this, and certainly I’m a grownup, so I do it too. And of course, I know that Harry Potter is a fictional character, and yet he and his friends have a reality in my head. I identify with Hermione because I was a smart little girl with bushy blonde hair. And so that’s just another way of relating to our social worlds, looking at these people. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the people that we identify with and are enthralled with, they’re beautiful people. They’re highly skilled people, of course we find them interesting. So it’s hardly surprising.
Mills: What about differences across countries and cultures? I ask that because we Americans are so obsessed with celebrity, and I’m wondering, are there other countries where this phenomenon is just as prevalent or are we like the leaders in the pack here?
Tukachinsky Forster: Well, we’re not the leaders and the pack, think about all the K-pop phenomena, for example, just to throw out one. So unfortunately, there isn’t as much cross-cultural research as I would like to see, but there is definitely a lot of research conducted around the world on parasocial relationships from China to Europe, to Israel to the Americas. So there isn’t a lot of data that allows you to compare head to head the intensity of the parasocial relationship. But it’s definitely been documented and those processes appear to be relatively universal, which makes sense because if you look theory perspective, the reason we have those connections is because we don’t really, as humans, we haven’t been around for long enough to develop an entirely different cognitive neural structure to process mediated relationships. We don’t have symbols and media around us for long enough to be specialized just in that. Rather, it appears that the same cognitive neural mechanisms that are involved in thinking about people around you in your social world are also the same ones that we’re employing when we are looking at media. And that would be true in any culture. And as Karen was saying, these are talented, skillful, attractive people that also using media to make a living by having you like them. So universally, that’s the trend we see.
Dill-Shackleford: I remember hearing that if Jackie Chan was dating someone, teenage girls in China would be very upset by that. And of course, we can think of many, many instances in which things like that were true.
Mills: Sure. So I want to talk about when parasocial relationships move into sort of dangerous territory. I mean, it’s possible for them to become toxic and harmful—
Tukachinsky Forster: Right? Yeah. It is not the case that a normal person develops a normal parasocial relationships and then it goes and becomes more and more intense and explodes into something like that. That’s not happening. It’s the other way around. If there are people with mental illness and they will have an outlet for that mental illness, it’s not, the parasocial relationship got extreme and they became extreme and they became violent because the parasocial relationship became too intense. It’s people who have a problem, and for some people it’s manifested in being obsessive about one thing. And for some people it’s being obsessive about a media thing, and it just happens to be this very small percent of people with a problem. It’s not related to parasocial relationship, which is a normal thing.
Mills: Well, let me ask this just to wrap up, which is what are you working on now? What are the big questions that remain in this area?
Dill-Shackleford: One thing I’m working on right now is trying to be more clear about the way that we define parasocial versus identification versus liking versus similarity. Because in science, we have to define our terms in order to know what it is we’re talking about. And so for instance, sometimes people will say empathy, empathy with a character. And I’ve just done a study that’s a factor analysis with Josh Cohen and Perry Reed that says that those things fall into specific and different constructs even though they’re related to each other. So what I’m trying to do is to get scientists to say the term that they mean and not use multiple terms for one term.
Another study that I’m working on with some colleagues has to do with the question of whether you can identify with and have a parasocial relationship with a couple. And we are using the case of Jim and Pam from The Office. And preliminary data shows that you can indeed have a parasocial relationship with them as a couple. And I think part of that is when you watch a couple and you’re in the “will they/won’t they” phase of the relationship, what you really want is for them to get together, for their relationship to work out. And we also want to know whether becoming attached or invested in the relationship between a fictional couple, like Jim and Pam from The Office, means that you feel strange or uncomfortable with the actor’s real relationship, such as John Krasinski being married to Emily Blunt. So stay tuned on that one. We’re almost finished with the analysis.
Tukachinsky Forster: I have two questions that I’m particularly interested in. So the first one is related to cancel culture and what happens when you decide to terminate the relationship with someone you liked in the media? My research shows that it’s a very difficult decision when the media personality disappoints you, when you had a good relationship with them. It is really heartbreaking for someone to break up with them, and people will go to great lengths to defend them and to defend a celebrity that betrayed them and to stand up with them, but for them. But in some situations, they will engage in cancel culture and will break up with them. So I’m trying to see the situations, the conditions, the factors that will play a role in whether it will go one way or another, and those negative parasocial relationship, because we always talk about the positive parasocial relationships about the friendship and the crush, but what about the jealousy?
For example, if I have a parasocial relationship with Justin Bieber and then he marries someone and all the hate messages that she receives from his fans, for example. So all those negative parasocial relationships is one area that is understudied and I’m very excited to look into. So the other thing is that most research up until today was looking at one relationship or one media celebrity outside of broader context. But when we see the same media personality in many different contexts and situations and how do we project from one to another or how we carry information across different contexts, especially between the fictional and the real, if you have a parasocial relationship with an actor, but also the character that they portray. So interestingly, even as adults, we don’t strictly maintain the boundaries between the actor and the character, even though in our rational mind we know that that’s his job to play this character.
It’s not the actor. Nonetheless, we are misattributing the characteristics of the character onto the actor that portrays them. And I have research that shows how you can see the exact same actress playing in the same movie. You just added the movie slightly to depict her as either a positive or a negative character. And then it’ll taint how the participants would rate the actress and how they perceive her. And then if I show them a commercial to donate to San Jude’s Hospital or something like that, and I’ll ask them for their reaction, if they saw that actress playing a character that is likable and a hero, they will be like, oh, this is so moving, and she’s such a generous person. And you show them the exact same PSA after they saw her playing the villain character, they will be like, oh, this commercial is so cheesy. She’s doing it just for publicity.
So I’m very interested in seeing how things—it affects the parasocial relationship with that actor. So I’m interested in seeing how we carry over things from exposure to exposure and cross context. Like you just saw Ryan Gosling as Ken in Barbie being—so this role versus his more dramatic roles before. How does that change your perception of him? How does it change your parasocial relationship with him and how seeing him being Ken is going to affect you perceiving him in his next role? Or maybe you see Ken as a much more profound and interesting and complex character because he’s played by this actor. So those are the questions I’m interested in.
Dill-Shackleford: If I may, I’d love to tag onto that. So that’s a great study, and I want to remind listeners that we may take this research as trivial, that Dr. Tukachinsky Forster and I are just spending our time talking about Ken and Barbie, and that’s great for our salaries and everything, but it’s just a waste of time. But I’m a social psychologist and I’m here to tell you that it is fundamental social psychology, that it’s the fundamental attribution error, which is partially definitional of the field of social psych, that when I see someone acting some way, I assume it’s because of their personality. That’s the type of person they are. And Ryan Gosling has only one body. It’s a good one, but it’s only one body. So when we look at him, we say, but I’ve seen him do this. I know that he feels like that. Like Dr. Tukachinsky Forster referred to earlier, we don’t have a switch in our brain that says, no, that’s him as Ken, and this is him as Ryan. He’s got the same body, he’s the same person. So we’re not dumb for having that, we’re not delusional for having that confusion over who is he? Is William Shatner Captain Kirk, or is he William Shatner? Both. So it is fundamental social psych. It’s not just fun, but it is fun to be a parasocial researcher
Tukachinsky Forster: And it does have real life implications for casting, for deciding, should I take this role? Right? Is this going to ruin me for choosing sponsorships? Like this person has, this actor has an amazing blockbuster Oscar-nominated movie, but they’re playing a villain character. Will they be the best spokesperson for my charity organization? So it has real life implications all the time.
Mills: Yeah. Well, this has been really fascinating. I want to thank you both for joining me. This has been not just interesting and scientific, but fun.
Dill-Shackleford: Thanks so much. It was great.
Tukachinsky Forster: Thank you so much.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
