The Parasocial Turn: Why One-Sided Bonds With Creators Keep Intensifying

Every December, Cambridge Dictionary picks a word that says something about the year that just happened. For 2025, it picked "parasocial," a term that used to live in communication-studies textbooks and now shows up in TikTok captions, therapy sessions and think pieces about podcasters, chatbots and pop stars.

The dictionary's own explanation was blunt: what was once a specialist academic term has become mainstream, and millions of people are now living inside relationships the other party doesn't know exist.

A Term That Escaped The Lab

The word itself is not new. It was coined in 1956 by two University of Chicago sociologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who noticed that television viewers were forming what felt like friendships with news anchors and talk-show hosts they had never met.

Their insight was that mass media had created a strange kind of intimacy at a distance: the audience member feels close to the performer, but the performer has no idea the audience member exists. That asymmetry is the whole definition. It does not require obsession or delusion, only a bond that runs in one direction.

What has changed since 1956 is not the basic mechanism but its resolution. A talk-show host appeared once a night, for an hour, wearing a suit. A creator today can appear a dozen times a day, in a bedroom, mid-sentence, apparently unfiltered. The more granular and constant the access, the more convincing the illusion of a real relationship becomes.

The Double-Edged Data

This is where the psychology gets less tidy than either the panic pieces or the wellness content suggest. A 2026 meta-analysis pulling together 17 studies and 52 effect sizes looked specifically at parasocial engagement with social media influencers and mental health outcomes, and found a moderate but real overall association.

The finding that complicates the usual narrative is the direction of that association. Parasocial bonds correlated more strongly with positive outcomes than negative ones, and their single strongest link was to general wellbeing, not to anxiety or depression.

The effect was not evenly distributed. It was strongest among adolescents, and noticeably stronger in samples from East Asian countries than in Western ones, suggesting that age and cultural context shape how much a one-sided bond can substitute for other forms of social connection.

None of this makes parasocial attachment harmless by default. It means the research does not support a simple story where these bonds are inherently unhealthy. They function, in the language the researchers use, as a psychological double-edged sword: capable of real comfort and real harm, often in the same relationship, depending on how much weight it is asked to carry.

When The Feed Talks Back

The harm side became difficult to look away from in August 2024, when Chappell Roan posted a pair of TikToks addressed directly to fans who had been following her family, demanding photos, and reacting badly when she said no.

That's not normal. That's weird.

What made the moment notable was not that a famous person complained about fans, which has happened for decades, but the specific vocabulary she used. She wasn't describing stalking as an occupational hazard. She was naming the psychological mechanism underneath it and refusing to accept it as the cost of doing business.

Sally Theran, a psychologist at Wellesley College who studies parasocial bonds between celebrities and young fans, told CNN at the time that social media has made these attachments easier to form, and that short-form video in particular amplifies the emotional charge by giving fans a steady stream of seemingly unfiltered access.

That amplification is not accidental. Platforms are built to reward the appearance of intimacy, because intimacy is what keeps someone watching the next video instead of closing the app. A creator who seems like a friend generates more minutes of attention than one who seems like a performer, and the incentive structure of the entire industry now runs on that difference.

The Tragedy As Fandom

The same mechanism does not stay confined to musicians and influencers. It has also attached itself to people who never asked to be public figures at all. The trial of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother charged with killing her three children after what her defense describes as postpartum psychosis, has become a case study in how quickly a parasocial audience can form around raw tragedy.

A New Statesman commentary on the coverage described the sheer number of people who had developed a one-sided emotional attachment to the people involved as chilling to watch unfold in real time.

There is no celebrity persona being cultivated in that case, no album cycle or brand deal. What is being cultivated, instead, is a sense of ownership over someone else's private catastrophe, filtered through the same emotional wiring that makes a fan feel entitled to a pop star's time. The underlying bond is identical even when the target has done nothing to invite it.

Podcasts sit somewhere between those two extremes. Guardian critic Rachel Aroesti has written about the specific intimacy of listening to the same voices talk, unscripted, week after week, until she knows their arguments and insecurities better than she knows some of her actual friends, a closeness she noted runs entirely one way.

That format-level intimacy is precisely why book clubs, advice shows and interview podcasts have become such reliable engines of parasocial attachment. The medium removes almost every visual and social cue that would normally remind a listener they are consuming a product rather than having a conversation.

What Creators Owe Their Audience

For creators, the practical question is not whether to allow parasocial attachment, since it is largely a byproduct of doing the work at all, but whether to exploit it. There is a meaningful difference between accepting that an audience feels close to you and actively manufacturing that closeness to extract more engagement, more purchases, or more forgiveness for bad behavior.

Naming the dynamic openly, the way Roan did, is one way to interrupt it without severing the relationship entirely. So is being consistent about what is and isn't available: which details of a life are shared, which are not, and why. Ambiguity about that boundary is what allows an audience to keep testing it.

What Audiences Can Do

For audiences, the useful move is not guilt but calibration. If you notice that a creator's absence from your feed for a day changes your mood, or that you feel entitled to details they haven't offered, that is worth registering as information rather than shame. The meta-analysis suggests these bonds are often genuinely good for you; the same research suggests they stop being good once they start replacing relationships that could actually reciprocate.

The bond itself is not the problem. It becomes one only when either side forgets that it only runs in a single direction.