Parasocial Relationships and Cults of Personality

I've referenced this a bit, but what is it?

Well, let's think about California for a moment. California has a habit of electing actors to be governors -  that cowpoke Ronald Reagan (who later went on to become president) and THE GUBERNATOR Arnold Schwarzenegger come to mind. Heck, Clint Eastwood was mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Is it some weird California thing?

Nah. Trump was a celebrity before getting into politics, and he used the same thing as the actors just mentioned: a quirk of human behavior called parasocial relationships. What's important here is that they're celebrities, and people's relationship with them as celebrities impacted their assessment of their suitability for public office.

So, what are parasocial interactions?

Parasocial interactions are relationships we form with people we've never met, primarily media personalities, but also with politicians and other public figures.* People also form attitudes and expectations with other "characters" in our daily dramas, like companies and government institutions. A good example of these sorts of relationships is the fans of actors and musicians. It's also part of why certain TV shows feel "cozy," as if you're spending time with friends “in a place where everybody knows your name.”

We also see that people have some difficulty separating creators and their work. An easy and fairly harmless example is disliking a person's film because they're personally objectionable.** More complicated is the impact of the feeling of closeness and expectation that they will behave as their characters do. When they don’t, there are a number of odd things that pop up, such as feeling betrayed should a celebrity change their style or make a major life decision that is contrary to a fan's perception of them, but more important for our purposes are the ways that parasocial attachment impacts how we think about these people.

Parasocial attachment and how we think about celebrities

Not to pick on Tom Hanks, but we're more likely to blindly trust the information celebrities we like  give us. ("Tom Hanks is always such a nice guy, why would he lie to me about the coming Martian apocalypse?")

We're also more likely to defend them against accusations. People feel protective, as if defending a close friend. ("Tom Hanks is always such a nice guy, there's no way that he'd have done something bad! I'll fight anyone who casts shade on my pookie bear!")

We're more likely to come up with excuses to explain away actions or information that runs contrary to our idea of the figure. ("Sure, Tom Hanks killed a bunch of people, but it wasn't malicious.")

On the other hand

Parasocial influence is useful for a number of things- for example, Edward Schiappa, Peter B. Gregg, & Dean E. Hewes' well-supported parasocial contact hypothesis indicates that positive portrayals of minorities in media can improve perception of that minority in populations who otherwise have no contact with that group. In other words, Nichelle Nichols' role as Uhura on Star Trek was exactly as important as Martin Luther King, Jr. told her, both for the African American Community and for American society as a whole.**

At the same time, research suggests that as we spend more time using social media, interacting with others remotely via our digital personae, targeted assemblages composed of carefully staged photos and increasingly AI-aided commentary, we are losing the ability to distinguish between sociality and parasociality.

This attachment to the person can combine with cognitive dissonance reduction strategies to produce some truly ludicrous results. For example, followers of preacher William Miller, whose movement would eventually become the Adventists, predicted the world would come to an end some time between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When March 21, 1844, passed without incident, he revised his estimate to April 18. When the world failed to end again, he doubled down on his analysis and pronounced that he was certain that the world really would end on October 22nd of that same year. This also did not happen. However, through it all, his followers became more and more invested, gathering in large groups with him to see the world end. The failure of the world to end on October 22nd finally shook the majority of his followers' faith, but hundreds remained convinced in the underlying legitimacy of Miller's claims and went on to form the Advent Christian Church, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Seventh-day Adventists.

What difference does all of this make? 

1. Parasociality gives rise to cults of personality today, as it has throughout history. Think of the omnipresent royal imagery in Mesopotamia, where exaggerated portraits of the king depict him slaying enemies and wild beasts. Mass media propelled this farther, with the leader now able to address the population directly and become omnipresent in people's lives. Stalin and Hitler leap to mind, but American politicians are also persistent media personalities. Sociologists such as Robert Bellah have noted that American politics, in particular, is dominated by personalities. We will discuss structural issues in American media in a future post, but remember, American politicians spend more time campaigning and advertising than in any other country. Americans are constantly bombarded by propaganda and news making bringing politicians into their daily lives.

2. That's bad enough, but if we look at Trump and Musk, both men had acquired celebrity status before dabbling in politics. Both continue to use their carefully cultivated personae to lend gravitas to their statements. What we're seeing with them is personality-driven politics, which not only supports their toxic leadership style but also plays well in the media. You can't turn off these characters when every news channel is reporting on their latest sneezen addition, they also now control their own propaganda engines in the form of social media platforms. The result is an intensification of media fragmentation.

3.  Another worry is the potential rise of the influencer-politician. Influencers and content creators have ready-made fan bases that they can easily mobilize to start a campaign. It's similar to the way that actors like Reagan made the jump, but here, the illusion of interactivity is stronger due to the practices of the contemporary attention economy.

4. Politics will only become more personality driven and as it does, the average person's ability to spot bullshit will degrade because we're simply not built to handle this. There are some practices that could be of use, but fundamentally, thinking your friends with someone who doesn't even know you exist is dangerous, particularly when we think about strategies of toxic leadership.

So what can we do?

Since we aren’t getting rid of parasociality, it's just how the average human works; we, as a species, have to learn to recognize it and live with it.

Part of the solution may be the dissemination of practices to help people recognize that they don't really know media personalities; the idea of being a fan of a public official should be laughable.

Reform of media and social media patterns is also key. Some of this is likely to come about as a result of campaign reform- shortening the primary season and limiting ad time. We also need to ensure that social media algorithms are not for profit. More and more evidence is emerging that social media platforms are intentionally designed to be addictive by using emotional manipulation to evoke strong emotions, particularly anger, to keep people reading and posting. With social media aiding the illusion of parasocial relationships, it is more important than ever that our platforms are designed with users, not owners, in mind.

Another solution may involve changes to the political apparatus. We're already seeing that, just as the founding fathers predicted, partisan politics shuts down the checks and balances. When we revise the constitution, an increased role for the boring, faceless bureaucracy may be desirable.

Exactly what we will do is not certain,  but it is certain that this  is something we need to start thinking about. Above all, we need tools to help make politics about issues, not personalities, because the problems we are seeing now are only going to get worse until they’re fixed.  

*I would even go so far as to suggest that the same mechanisms of emotive connection to hypothetical or non-immediate people is at play in things like nationalism and identity formation, wherein attitude towards a designated group is mediated through an attachment towards the idea of that group– We’re working in emotive relationships with people we’ve never met. In all of these, there’s an element of asymmetry as we’re unable to personally interact with the person or all of the persons involved and thus rely on perceptions fed to us by official institutions, be it official propaganda or increasingly corporate driven media. Even personal social media is curated.

**Note this is making an aesthetic judgement on the basis of the creator's character, not choosing to boycott a product because of the creator's behavior. For example, my understanding is that Mel Gibson is a very talented director. That does not change the fact that I will not go see/stream anything that he's touched because I do not want to empower a racist antisemite.

***Research also shows that positive depictions of group members in media inspire members of said group; simply showing a class of Sub-Saharan African school children Black Panther made them perform better on their tests because it helped them imagine themselves like Wakandans. It seems common sense, but it's always worth pointing out that diversity in media really does make a measurable difference.