What is a parasocial relationship?

Inspiration

The first time I heard the term parasocial relationship was when I was listening to Leo Laporte on one of the TWiT network’s podcasts.

Findings

• I found a paper called Podcast Studies that starts to dig into this, but it was written in 2022 and it referred to podcasts as “new”, so that lost me a bit as I’ve been listening to them for over 12 years.
• From Findapsychologist.org:

Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars.

The article also references the following study staying that it found no correlation between loneliness and the intensity of viewers’ parasocial relationship with onscreen characters.

Loneliness, Parasocial Interaction, and Local Television News Viewing | Human Communication Research | Oxford Academic

Other research has decreased the stigma of such relationships and led clinicians to believe that such relationships can broaden one’s social network rather than restrict it.

Etymology

para-: Forming miscellaneous terms in the sense ‘analogous or parallel to, but separate from or going beyond, what is denoted by the root word (Source)

So analogous or parallel to social relationships, but separate from them because they’re one-sided.