by Johanna L. Degen//
When the Cambridge Dictionary named parasocial its Word of the Year for 2025, it recognized a concept researchers have examined for decades, yet only recently observed novel mechanisms that have shifted its meaning in scale and significance. Parasocial relationships are one-sided attachments formed between followers and media figures, today primarily influencers and increasingly AI (chats and companions). Contemporary psychological research shows that these relationships have become a central mechanism of subjectification and social organizing, shaping identity formation, orientation, affect regulation, and group dynamics across billions of users, materializing in everyday practices.
Parasociality describes felt closeness, intimacy, and relational commitment toward a digital figure who reciprocates only to a mass audience and nowadays increasingly between humans and AI. Horton and Wohl (1956) first conceptualized the phenomenon in relation to television personalities and their fans. What was once limited to star–fan dynamics has been transformed by social media, and its typical quasi-privacy, which has entered the habitual life and meaning-making of users in their everyday lives.
Parasocial mechanisms now unfold continuously through micro-processes: scrolling a feed on the bus, falling asleep to an influencer’s livestream, purchasing a product because it feels like following a friend’s advice or acting loyally toward a meaningful other.
The relational component is decisive. Online engagement is not primarily about information, entertainment, fear of missing out, or addictive-like behavior (habits). It fulfills core functions of the social self: opinion formation, soothing, social belonging, decision-making, orientation, and identity processes. As time spent online increases as a mass phenomenon — and access begins earlier in life — social functions of the self are gradually and increasingly relocated into the digital sphere, becoming habitual and central. As a consequence, today we no longer speak of the social self but of the shaping of the parasocial self, deeply entangled with online realities and their specific characteristics.
Parasociality, however, is not a neutral sphere nor a merely convenient form of being social. It follows specific principles shaped by platform architecture and digital logics, which are incorporated and widely adopted as new norms. In that context, social needs are increasingly conditioned by business models, where a cue for friendship becomes a click or a purchase. Communicative rules favor reductionism, unequivocalness, ad hominem logic, and cancel culture, impeding dialogue and trust in others and in information, and in meaning-making and socialization online, which materialize beyond the digital in everyday decisions, regarding i.a., work, voting, investment, residence, romantic relationships, and reproduction.
Parasocial Mechanisms Beyond Cognitive Reflection
Media literacy and politics often address parasociality by emphasizing that “online isn’t real”. This approach fails on two counts. First, online realities are materially consequential. Second, users know it differs from face-to-face interaction, yet parasocial mechanisms operate beyond cognitive reflection and remain effective beyond critical thinking.
Influencers on Instagram and TikTok create content that appears intimate and personal. Through personal language (“family,” “confidants”), supposedly behind-the-scenes disclosure, and continuous content throughout the day and across life stages, they produce a sense of interconnectedness. Followers process this as relational, and the social self responds as it would in other relationship formations, through commitment and relatedness.
Parasocial attachment forms in the reality-fiction gap between orchestration and perceived authenticity, and there is no evolutionary barrier protecting the self from relational entanglement. The significance of this became apparent in recent attempts to make policy regarding advertisement disclosure, aimed at protecting followers, overruled by parasocial mechanisms. Easily, followers coded disclosure of advertisement as cues of trustworthiness, and social media consequently remains the most effective marketing tool of all time.
Users describe their account choices as expressive: “What I follow says something about who I am” and influencers serve as role models, significant others, places of solace, and hosts of community, whose visibility carries genuine psychosocial weight.
For instance, users turn to influencer content for self-soothing after conflicts, in distress, in anxiety, or loneliness, and experience short-term mood improvement. The structural issue lies in substitution. Short-term relief does not address underlying distress, and habitual reliance on parasocial co-regulation seems to displace the development of reciprocal relational competencies.
A reciprocal dynamic and a double bind evolve between push and pull factors. Parasociality attracts through convenience and immediate relief. Simultaneously, structural loneliness and social fragmentation push individuals toward it. However, prolonged online engagement and parasocial involvment has repeatedly been associated with increased loneliness, social erosion, neonihilism, and individualization.
Epistemic Authority and vulnerabilities
Parasocial involvement on social media and in AI contexts is accompanied by high epistemic authority. Information communicated by influencers or AI systems is often perceived as more trustworthy than that from public sources, friends, or family. Even when users cannot fully understand AI output, they defer to their own judgment, assuming algorithmic superiority.
Moreover, vulnerability is unequally distributed, and attachment anxiety, social isolation, and minority status predict higher parasocial involvement. Yet these populations often lack adequate mental health support, media literacy education, or social capital to navigate parasocial risks.
Inequality is reinforced when parasocial communities, while offering belonging and affirmation, remain embedded in platform capitalism’s individualization logic. Empowerment, for instance within parasocial feminism, remains tethered to consumption and individual identity work rather than collective structural change, and the digital infrastructure of community thus becomes a resource and a constraint.
Conclusion: Cause and function-oriented policy making
What is required is the restoration of conditions that allow a dignified, socially embedded life in which parasociality functions as a tool rather than a substitute for core social relations. The decisive question is whether digital infrastructures support living or reorganize life around their own logic (cause orientation).
The ethical stakes are clear: Autonomy is compromised when platform architectures exploit psychological vulnerabilities and when parasociality substitutes for social infrastructure, rendering consent insufficient when users experience core social functions only online (function orientation).
Policies that address merely excessive screen time, harmful content, or misleading advertising, without addressing the social conditions that make parasocial relationships not merely attractive but necessary, will remain inadequate.
Dr. Johanna L. Degen is a social psychologist at Europa-Universität Flensburg
References
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