The Creator Psychology Glossary

Parasocial interaction

What it is

Someone on a screen looks into the camera and talks, and for a moment it feels like they're talking to you, even though they can't see you and don't know you exist. The feeling runs one way. That experience, in the moment, is called parasocial interaction. A longer-lasting attachment to someone you watch over time is usually called a parasocial relationship, and researchers treat the two as separate things.

The term comes from a 1956 essay by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in the journal Psychiatry, written about radio and television personalities. Its subtitle describes the idea in four words: intimacy at a distance.

The study

In 2011, Tilo Hartmann and Charlotte Goldhoorn ran an online experiment to test what a performer can do to create that feeling. They recorded four versions of a three-minute clip of a woman giving her opinion of TV call-in shows, and each of the 198 participants watched one version, assigned at random.

They changed two things. In some versions she looked straight into the camera the whole time, and in others she was filmed from the side, in profile. Separately, in some versions she spoke the way you'd talk to adults, which matched the viewers, and in others she spoke the way you'd talk to young children, adjusting her tone of voice and her wording for a child. Afterward, viewers answered six questions about how much they'd felt in an interaction with her.

Viewers reported a stronger sense of interaction when she looked into the camera, and separately, a stronger sense when she spoke to them as adults. Two things about the viewers mattered too: people who found her more attractive reported a stronger sense of interaction, and so did people who were better at imagining another person's point of view. The stronger the feeling, the more viewers enjoyed the clip.

There was one more result. Viewers who felt a stronger sense of interaction also said it would have felt rude to switch the clip off early or to shout an insult at the screen. The authors call this commitment to social norms. They describe it as an automatic response that may fade once viewers stop and think about the fact that she can't actually see them.

Where this stops applying

This is one experiment with 198 people, two-thirds of them women, and mostly students or university graduates. The performer wasn't a trained presenter, the clips were filmed by a nonprofessional, and viewers watched on a computer. The authors note those limits themselves. The feeling was measured by asking viewers afterward, and the authors point out that people may play down a feeling like this once they think about it. It's also a single three-minute clip, so it says nothing about what happens over months of following someone.

What to do with it

Look into the lens for the whole video, and talk to your viewer in the words and tone you'd use with the adult who's actually watching. Those were the two changes that raised the feeling in this experiment, and both happen while you're filming.

Next step

The free Psychology-Driven Content Playbook covers the know, like and trust ladder for turning followers into customers, which is the stretch that comes after a viewer feels they know you. It's at datapsych.net/free.

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