Strong relationships are powerfully linked to well-being. But not all social ties are equal. Psychologists who investigate “parasocial relationships” explore the connection people feel with celebrities, social media stars, imaginary friends and fictional characters. These are attachments where you feel you know someone who, in turn, is incapable of knowing you, says social neuroscientist Dylan Wagner of the Ohio State University.
Wagner studies brain activity to better understand how people think about their social connections. In recent years he has shifted his focus toward comparing the relationships people create with fictional and real others. He has found that these relationships resemble and differ from each other in surprising ways—which provides insight into how people connect to stories, the virtual world and one another. Scientific American spoke to Wagner about this research.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
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You began comparing how we think about fictional and real people by studying Game of Thrones fans. What motivated that work?
After a few years of looking at how the brain learns about other people, we thought it would be interesting to compare how people think about real friends, along with fictional people. For fictional characters, we took advantage of the fact that Game of Thrones has a huge fan base, so it’s relatively easy to find superfans—that meant we could have the same fictional characters across all participants.
We used a task that involved asking people to think about the personality of these characters and about people whom they knew in real life. While they were doing this, we looked at their brain activity using fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging], specifically the medial prefrontal cortex. That’s where 20 years of social neuroscience suggests we’ll find this convergence of thinking about yourself, thinking about other people, forming impressions of people, etcetera.
We ran into something that was really intriguing. We found big differences in how much brain activity you see in this region when people are thinking about real versus fictional others. Thinking about fictional characters activates this region a heck of a lot less than thinking about real people. Maybe we should have expected that—but we found it quite surprising.
Why was that so unexpected?
For the longest time, scientists have been using ostensibly fictional characters in research. It’s standard practice in social psychology and neuroscience to study how participants form impressions of people that the experimenters made up. If the brain pushes fictional others into one container while real people are put over here, that’s potentially a problem.
But some characters still provoked a relatively strong response in certain people, right?
That was the second finding. We looked at a measure called trait identification, which combines how likely you are to identify with fictional characters and how transported you are by a story. Basically, some people are more likely to get sucked into a narrative and really imagine the lives and minds of the characters than other people are.
For people who scored high in that trait, the closer they felt to a character, the more likely it was that thinking about the character would elicit a response in the brain that was similar to the response to a real person, like an acquaintance, if not a friend.
In other words, when people really get swept away by a story, fictional characters become more real—even if those characters are riding around on dragons. What influences how immersed we feel in a story?
We’ve looked at several things connected to this trait. We’ve found that people easily transported by stories show brain activity that suggests they watch movies and think about them in a more similar way to one another than people low in that trait.
So when we show them the movie Forrest Gump, for instance, people high in this trait seem to be processing information in the same way over the course of the movie. Afterward, their perceptions of characters are more similar than those of people who are not easily transported by narratives. One way to think of it is that these people are more under the sway of the director. Meanwhile people who are low in this trait don’t seem to process information in the same way as one another or the people who are really immersed in the movie.
Does seeing a fictional character as more “real” influence our behavior?
It could. Some of our other work with fictional characters has more to do with how attached you are or how close you feel to them. If you feel close to someone, are they more persuasive, for example? Does it make you more susceptible to misinformation? Think about influencers. They are real people, but they’re not really friends or acquaintances. They fall into this category called parasocial relationships.
This concept was originally defined as a way of understanding people's relationship with their 6 P.M. newscaster, back in the day when everyone in the U.S. was watching the same TV networks. Today it’s the way many people probably feel about John Oliver. It’s a person or character you don’t really have a real, reciprocal relationship with—but you feel like you see them regularly and know them in the way that’s similar to how you know people in real life.
And actually parasocial relationships have consequences. There’s even a “breakup” effect, where the end of a favorite TV show—such as Friends—makes you feel sad at never being able to see those characters again
As another example, we know that if you’re doing a difficult task, such as solving an anagram, thinking about a real friend improves your performance. It turns out that’s also true when you think of your favorite fictional character. It’s this phenomenon called social facilitation—the idea is that your performance increases perhaps because your attention ramps up in response to this social cue, whether from a real person or someone you feel like you know.
In April a research group published findings that suggest some people feel their parasocial relationships more effectively fulfill emotional needs than in-person acquaintances. Does that mean these relationships substitute for real connections?
I really don’t know how well they can fulfill similar roles to actual friendships. There are a lot of studies we could potentially do.... One trick is that these relationships are not reciprocal: you can’t ask this person for relationship advice or support them through a tough time. But maybe they still give you a sense of belonging.
Through the Game of Thrones experiments, you found that, among lonely people, the differences between how the brain responds to real and fictional others blur. Why would that happen?
We were inspired to look at that question after an amazing paper—put out by Megan Meyer, now at Columbia University—found that when people think about themselves, their friends and celebrities, lonelier people tend to have more idiosyncratic brain activity.
One explanation for our findings, based on the literature, is that lonely people are low in a sense of belongingness. They may turn to fictional characters or TV personalities—and then the fictional character becomes more real.
That said, there’s a whole other possible explanation for our results. It’s possible that the less time you spend with real people, the more those people look like fictional characters.
So real people would be perceived more like fictional ones? How so?
This is just a hypothesis but it’s entirely possible that—as more of us connect with others virtually—real people are getting downgraded and starting to look more like fictional characters in the way that our brain is processing them. If a lonely person’s real friends and acquaintances are less physically present in their life because they primarily connect online, that may push them into the realm of a parasocial relationship.
That’s one of the directions I’d like to go in future research. We are animals, and the full range of your voice, smell, appearance, that’s all being filtered in virtual interaction. It’s possible that a real person’s physical presence ramps up all of these older animal ways of boosting attention. And the result may be that you don’t have the same emotional impact in virtual connection as in physical proximity.
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