After watching a video meant for participants to build a relationship with the video creator and a video where the creator talked about his/her mental health issues, experimental groups scored lower on explicit prejudice assessments compared to controls who only watched the relationship-building video. Implicit prejudice levels were not affected. The study was published in Scientific Reports.
Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships we form with people who are unaware of our existence. We form such connections constantly and they influence how we behave. Parasocial relationships are sometimes formed with fictional targets such as book and movie characters. These relationships are one-sided by their very nature.
Parasocial relationships can also be formed with real people, such as celebrities. Forming such relationships is made particularly easy through modern media formats that allow us insights into private lives of celebrities and content creators, which can make us perceive them as friends. Even though these relationships are not reciprocated and are solely in one direction, research has shown that they can satisfy our emotional, cognitive and behavioral needs. They can make us feel less lonely, but also influence our purchasing decisions and the way we see ourselves.
Can parasocial relationships be used to reduce prejudice? When we form a bad opinion about a person based on nothing else than knowledge about the group membership of that person, we are dealing with prejudice. Mental health issues are known to be one very important target of prejudice.
To explore whether parasocial relationships could be used to reduce prejudice toward people with mental health issues, a group of UK scientists headed by Shaaba Lotun devised an experiment to test this. They recruited 557 study participants aged 18-35 years through Prolific, who spoke English as their first language and who have not experienced significant mental health issues or had close contacts with people with such experiences.
Participants were randomly assigned either to the control group or one of the two experimental conditions. They completed assessments of implicit prejudice (Implicit Association Test) towards people with mental and physical illnesses, explicit prejudice (Prejudice Towards People with Mental Illness Scale) before the experiment, immediately after the experiment and one week after the experiment. They were also asked whether they would volunteer with an organization helping people with bipolar disorder (a type of mental illness) and whether they would be willing to receive information about campaigns about this disorder.
In the experimental procedure, all three groups were first shown a video intended to build a parasocial relationship with the video creator. These videos were built using the “Fast Friends Paradigm” that previous studies demonstrated could make strangers see each other as friends in 9 minutes. For the purposes of this study, two different creators (A and B) made one such video each.
One was shown to one experimental group (the video created by creator A), the other to the other experimental group (created by creator B). After this, both experimental groups were shown another video where creator A talks about his experience with bipolar disorder. Experimenters asked questions about the content of these videos to make sure participants were paying attention. The control group was shown just the relationship-building video.
The results showed that there were no differences in implicit prejudices before the experiment and after watching the video where the creator talked about his bipolar disorder experience. The effect was absent both in the group that watched a relationship-building video from that creator and in the one that watched a relationship-building video from a different creator.
Explicit prejudice, on the other hand, was reduced after watching the second video. Explicit prejudice was lower in both experimental groups compared to controls, but the effect was the same both for the group that was supposed to form a relationship with that creator and with the group that was supposed to form a parasocial relationship with the other creator. The lower explicit prejudice levels were also found in the assessment made a week after the experiment.
“These findings expand our parasocial understanding in an exciting way, supporting the parasocial contact hypothesis and demonstrating further that one-way disclosure is sufficient to induce relationship strength, even in alternative contexts that center around a single experience such as mental health,” the authors conclude.
While providing important insights into how media could be used to affect prejudice, some limitations of these findings should be considered. Notably, the parasocial relationship created in the study was weak and some participants did not form it at all. Also, data show that no parasocial relationship was required for the sharing of experience about bipolar disorder to be effective at reducing the explicit prejudice.
The study, “Parasocial relationships on YouTube reduce prejudice towards mental health issues”, was authored by Shaaba Lotun, Veronica M. Lamarche, Spyridon Samothrakis, Gillian M. Sandstrom, and Ana Matran‑Fernandez.
