Parasocial relationships

Specification: Parasocial relationships: levels of parasocial relationships, the absorption addiction model and the attachment theory explanation.

Parasocial Relationships

Parasocial relationships refer to one-sided relationships with celebrities, a prominent person in the community, or a fictional character. Often a ‘fan’ will know everything about the person and feel very close to them, despite the fact that there is no chance of reciprocity.

Absorption Addiction Model

McCutcheon (2002) proposed the Absorption-Addiction Model to explain parasocial relationships. She suggests that people engage in celebrity worship to compensate for some deficiencies in their life, such as difficulty forming intimate relationships, poor psychological adjustment and lack of identity. Forming parasocial relationships with a celebrity allows them to achieve the fulfilment they lack in everyday life and adds a sense of purpose and excitement.

McCutcheon explains that looking for satisfaction in celebrity worship makes a person focus intensively on their parasocial relationship, and achieve a sense of fulfilment, which motivates them to become even more intensely attached to the celebrity. This is the first element of the model, absorption. This sense of fulfilment then becomes addictive for the person, leading them to engage in riskier behaviours such as stalking, in order to get mentally, and sometimes physically, closer to the celebrity they worship.

Giles and Maltby (2006) take this model further by identifying three levels of parasocial relationships, using the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) in a large-scale survey.

Stage 1: Entertainment – Social Level

Giles and Maltby suggest that most people engage in parasocial relationships at some point in their lives, but most stay at this first level where celebrities are seen as a source of entertainment and as a topic for lighthearted gossips with friends. This is the least intense level of celebrity worship, according to the Absorption-Addiction Model.

Stage 2: Intense – Personal Level

This is a deeper level of parasocial relationship. At this level a person has a more intense relationship with a celebrity. For example, they may see them as a soulmate and they have an intense interest in the celebrity’s personal life, such as their dress sense, food they like and entertainment in which they partake.

Stage 3: Borderline Pathological Level

This is the most intense level of parasocial relationships. At this level, a person takes celebrity worship to an extreme, has obsessive fantasies about the celebrity, spends large sums of money to obtain memorabilia and may engage in illegal activities such as stalking. At this level, it is also usual for people to believe that, if only they were given a chance to meet their favourite celebrity in person, their feelings would be reciprocated.

Attachment Theory Explanation

Alternative explanations of parasocial relationships attempt to use Bowlby’s (1969) attachment theory and Ainsworth’s (1971) types of attachment to explain celebrity worship. Bowlby’s theory predicts that individuals who did not form a strong bond with a primary caregiver in early childhood will try to find an attachment substitute as adults and engaging in parasocial relationships allows them to do just that.

It is suggested that individuals with insecure-resistant attachment type from early childhood will be more likely to form parasocial relationships, as they are too afraid of the criticism and rejection that are a part of real-life relationships. As was demonstrated by Ainsworth’s findings in Strange Situation study, insecure-resistant children were very clingy to their mothers, showed less explorative behaviour than children of other types, as they didn’t feel safe enough to leave a parent, and showed great distress when their mother left the room. According to Hazan and Shaver (1987), this behaviour translates into clingy and jealous behaviour in adulthood, making it difficult for such people to developed committed and lasting romantic relationships. Intensive celebrity worship allows such individuals to engage in fantasy about the perfect relationship, without heartbreak and rejection.

Cole and Leets (1999) investigated parasocial relationships that adolescents developed with TV personalities and found that teenagers with insecure-resistant attachment types were more likely to develop such relationships than those with insecure-avoidant and secure attachments.

Research Examining Parasocial Relationships

Research supports a link between loneliness and engaging in parasocial relationships. For example, Greenwood and Long (2009) found some evidence that people may develop celebrity worships as a way of dealing with a recent loss or loneliness. However, other research from Chory-Assad and Yanen (2005) failed to find any significant correlation between intensity of loneliness and intensity of a parasocial relationship, so the evidence is not conclusive on this matter.

Attachment theory is also supported by research studies. Kienlen et al. (1997) supported the idea that disturbed attachment in childhood may lead to the development of borderline-pathological level of parasocial relationships. They investigated the experiences of stalkers and found that 63% of their participants experienced a loss of a caregiver in early childhood while 50% experienced emotional and physical abuse. This shows that poor-quality early attachments or disruption to attachment may be associated with a tendency to engage with parasocial relationships later in life.

McCuthceon et al. (2006)

Aim: To test the attachment theory explanation of parasocial relationships.

Method: A sample of 299 students completed several questionnaires to ascertain if their early attachment with their parents during childhood would influence their likelihood to form parasocial relationships with celebrities in adulthood. Participants completed the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS), a questionnaire about celebrity stalking and, finally, a questionnaire about attachment style.

Results: The researchers found no association between attachment style of the participants and their likelihood to become attached to celebrities by forming parasocial relationships. However, it was noted that those individuals with an insecure attachment style were more likely to approve of stalking-type behaviours if expressed towards celebrities.

Conclusion: There is very limited evidence to support the attachment theory explanation of parasocial relationships.

Evaluating Parasocial Relationships

Research into parasocial relationships has useful real-world applications. Maltby (2003) linked types of personality to levels of parasocial relationships. He found that extraverts were more likely to be at the entertainment-social level, neurotics at the intense-personal level and psychotics at the borderline-pathological level. Further to this, Maltby et al. (2005) measured the relationship between celebrity worship and body image in teenagers and found that young girls who were at the intensepersonal level tended to have a poor body image, especially if they particularly admired a celebrity’s physical appearance. This suggests that research into parasocial relationships can be used to improve professionals' understanding of psychological disorders and help people struggling with psychological disorders.

 A problem with research into parasocial relationships is that it is correlational. This means that cause and effect cannot be clearly established, lowering the scientific explanatory power. For example, while a significant correlation was found between poor body image and intensive celebrity worship in teenage girls (Maltby et al., 2005), this does not mean, however, that intense celebrity worship causes poor body image. It may as well be that girls who already have a poor body image tend to engage in a more intensive level of parasocial relationships to enhance their self-esteem. This is a problem for research in this area where questions remain about the validity of its claims.

 Another methodological weakness of studies into parasocial relationships is that they rely heavily on self-report methods, such as interviews and questionnaires. These methods may not reflect an accurate picture of reality, as participants may demonstrate social desirability bias and therefore answer in a way that reflects them in better light rather than responding truthfully to the questions. This means that the reasons for developing parasocial relationships may be different from the ones uncovered by research, which lowers the internal validity of these explanations, making them less applicable to real life.

Extension Evaluation: Issues & Debates

 The Absorption-Addiction Model is better suited to describing levels of celebrity worship that explain how people develop these attitudes. This model attempts to establish universal principles of behaviour (nomothetic approach) and as such misses out on deep insight into the reasons for behaviour. An idiographic approach, looking into particular instances of parasocial relationships, may be better suited to the reasons for why people develop them.

 Despite some weaknesses, research into celebrity worship seems to be describing a universal phenomenon. For example, Schmid and Klimmt (2011) studied levels of parasocial relationships with characters from the Harry Potter books in different cultures and found similar levels of worship in Germany (individualist culture) and Mexico (collectivist culture). This suggests that the absorption-addiction model is universally applicable.

Possible Exam Questions

a. Explain what is meant by a longitudinal study. (2 marks)

b. Describe two disadvantages of a longitudinal study. (4 marks)

c. The researcher decided to use an online questionnaire to gather data. Explain why an online questionnaire would be a more suitable method for this research than a postal questionnaire. (2 marks)

Identify the level of parasocial relationship which Georgia is at. Explain Georgia’s behaviour using the absorption-addiction model. (4 marks)