How have parasocial relationships evolved from ancient times to the digital age? Explore the connections with gods in this modern age.
How the gods are like social influencers.
Key points
- Humans indulge in all sorts of imaginary parasocial relationships.
- The exercise of the imagination in parasocial relationships makes those relationships feel real.
- Humansโ relationships with the gods are examples of parasocial relationships.

Rupert Pupkin, in the Martin Scorsese film The King of Comedy, is an aspiring stand-up comedian who idolizes the celebrity talk show host-comedian Jerry Langford.
Pupkin meets Langford briefly after waiting at his stage door. On this basis, Pupkinโs long-standing imaginings about what he envisions as his close relationship with Langford only increase. Convinced that his career will take off if he can perform on Langfordโs show, Pupkin is repeatedly rebuffed by Langfordโs staff and, eventually, by Langford himself.
Pupkin finally gets his chance after kidnapping and holding Langford, whom he will only release once he gets a chance to open Langfordโs show. He appears on the show, is arrested, convicted, serves time, is paroled, publishes his autobiography, and subsequently appears in his own TV special.
Read More Here: 5 Warning Signs Of A Fake Online Relationship: Are You In One?
Relationships Based on Illusions
Pupkin has what prescient social scientists from the 1950s, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, call a โ parasocialโ relationship with Langford.
Horton and Wohl invent this concept to account for the imaginary relationships that humans are wont to entertain in response to performers on the new mass media of the mid-twentieth century, namely, radio, movies, and, especially, television.
Television, particularly, produces the illusion of having face-to-face relationships with people on the screen and creates โpersonalities,โ who have little or no notability beyond the medium itself.
Such personalitiesโ performances create illusions, first, of intimacy with the members of their audiences and, second, of persisting relationships that acquire a history in the minds of audience members and that elicit their loyal following in response to the personalitiesโ fabricated sincerity.
Horton and Wohl highlight a host of strategies still employed today for enhancing these illusions, including mimicking the style of informal conversations, including various subordinates (announcers, sidekicks, bandleaders, etc.) in the conversation, and mingling with studio audience members or, even, with people on the streets.
Crucially, such strategies cue audience members to imagine, like Pupkin does with Langford, rich personal relationships with these personalities. Horton and Wohl offer a half dozen real-life examples from their era of audience membersโ otherwise bizarre conduct rooted in such imaginary, parasocial relationshipsโincluding the thousands of marriage proposals that poured in for radioโs Lonesome Gal.
As means of mass communication have proliferated, parasocial relationships have attained an ever more prominent role in contemporary culture. We now live in an age of social media influencers, who have developed further strategies for stimulating imagined parasocial relationships among their followers.
To build what is, perhaps, an even greater sense of intimacy than any television personality can offer, no detail about an influencerโs life is too trivial to be shared on social media. Hundreds of thousands of followers learn what influencers had for lunch yesterday or whether influencers have decided to change hairstyles, let alone separate from their domestic partners.
Parasocial Relationships in Religions
Nothing requires that the other party in a parasocial relationship be empirically detectable. The Stanford University anthropologist, Tanya Luhrmann, holds that the concept can be readily extended to a host of additional casesโfrom childrenโs relationships with their imaginary friends to many readersโ (and novelistsโ) ongoing relationships with fictional characters.
Well-drawn characters in compelling narratives induce similar cognitive and emotional responses from readers that real social interactions do. Peopleโs imaginative efforts at โkindling the presence of invisible othersโ (as Luhrmann puts it in the subtitle of her recent book) help to make the relationship feel real.
Luhrmann holds, in effect, that religions tap into the same proclivities. Participantsโ relationships with the gods are parasocial, induced by narratives and a variety of practices to enhance the probability of such an outcome and resulting religious conviction.
She has spent more than a decade studying the ways that religions cultivate the imaginative capacities that stand behind this process of constructing parasocial relationships and kindling feelings of the presence of invisible agents.
As Luhrmann notes in an earlier book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, various religious groups, including some evangelical Christian groups, are straightforward and open about the need to exercise and foster such imaginings.
Read More Here: Understanding Parasocial Relationships With Celebrities
References
Horton, Donald & Wohl, R. Richard. (1956). Mass communication and parasocial interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry 19 (3): 215-29. DOI: 10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf.
Luhrmann, T. M. (2020). How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Written by: Robert N. McCauley, Ph.D.
Originally appeared on: Psychology Today

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