You’ve got a friend in me - The Benefits of Parasocial Relationships
You’ve got a friend in me - The Benefits of Parasocial Relationships
Have you ever wondered why Dora, from Dora the Explorer, takes a deliberately long pause after directing a question to young viewers? This type of interaction invites participation and maintains children’s attention. This seemingly social exchange that occurs through the screen can facilitate relationship-building akin to a face-to-face interaction, such that over time children will form relationships with their favourite media characters. These one-sided, emotionally charged relationships between a person and a media character are called parasocial relationships.
What makes a parasocial relationship?
Parasocial relationships in early childhood (0-8 years old) typically involve three factors: 1) attachment and friendship, 2) human-like needs (personification), and 3) social realism.
Attachment to media characters occurs when children seek proximity to them for comfort and security, as with attachment to a real person. Perceived friendship also strengthens this bond. For instance, preschoolers were more likely to transfer a problem solving solution to a similar, real-life scenario if they had greater trust in the character demonstrating the problem. In addition, school-age children prefer and are more strongly attached to characters of their same gender.
Personification refers to children attributing person-like qualities to media characters, including humanlike needs such as hunger. Children’s nurturing behaviors (e.g., putting to bed) towards a physical character toy are positively related to learning from that same character via video.
Social realism is the likelihood a media character could exist in the real world. The more realistic a child’s favorite character appears and acts, the greater the strength of the parasocial relationship.
Can children learn from media characters?
The answer to this question varies and can be largely dependent on the age of the child. For example, young children have trouble applying what they learn from two-dimensional (2D) sources, such as television, to the physical world, which is termed the transfer deficit. This effect can be mitigated when the 2D content is socially relevant to children (e.g., familiarity). For example, toddlers were more likely to learn an early math skill from watching a video of a familiar character, Elmo, than an unfamiliar character from Taiwan, DoDo. Additionally, children did even better on this task if they exhibited nurturing behaviors toward a physical toy of the familiar character (e.g., feeding it, rocking it like a baby).
However, it should be noted that familiarity alone isn’t always enough to promote learning through media. In another study, 18-month-olds were given a toy for three months that was either personalized to them or not personalized at all. The personalized toy said the child’s name and shared similar interests (e.g., same favorite food), whereas the impersonalized toy called the children ‘Pal’, had the opposite gender, and had randomly selected interests. After three months, children in both groups (i.e., those with personalized vs. impersonalized) watched a video demonstration of their toy’s character complete a math task and were then given the opportunity to try the task themselves. Their performance was compared to children who didn’t have the toy for three months and didn’t watch the video demonstration (control group). The children who played with the personalized toy (but not the impersonal toy), outperformed the control group on the math task. Again, more nurturing behaviors during toy play were related to improved performance. The authors concluded that the emotional bond children had with the personalized character was the reason for their improvement, rather than simply being familiar with the character.
Here are some actionable insights into how you might foster these parasocial relationships through media:
Attachment – create characters that make children feel safe and comfortable. In addition, show diverse characters so children are able to relate to them and build stronger attachments and relationships with them.
Personification – create characters that children can perceive as friends with thoughts and emotions, wants and needs.
Social realism – the extent of a character’s social realism becomes increasingly important with a child’s age. Imaginative play and treating characters as real during play begins in toddlerhood and peaks when children are about 4 years old. As children get older, their ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality improves, so it’s important to consider social realism during this developmental transition and beyond.
Personalization – children learn better when the information presented on-screen is socially relevant to them. For example, providing the option to program a child’s name and interests to a toy/app can be beneficial to learning from that character.
Take advantage of the multimedia landscape – provide a variety of platforms in which children can engage and interact with their favorite media characters (i.e., toys, apps, websites, shows, etc.).
Encourage parent participation – design content that invites the parent to participate, such as an eBook that encourages dialogic questioning. Parents can facilitate the parasocial relationship by encouraging their child to interact with the character on and offscreen (toy).
Social Contingency – newer media affords the design of intelligent characters that can provide timely, personalized responses to a child’s input, making the interaction more like a face to face conversation. For instance, preschoolers were more likely to respond to an onscreen character when the character seemed to wait for their response or repeated unanswered questions in comparison to when the character waited for a typical 2-second delay.
Brittany Huber, PhD
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers
Challenging Racism on the Screen
Challenging Racism on the Screen
When one hears the term “white supremacist,” it might call to mind vivid film depictions like Edward Norton’s vicious neo-Nazi skinhead in American History X or the ineffectual Ku Klux Klansmen that Quentin Tarantino used for a laugh in Django Unchained. But modern white supremacists are just as apt to hide behind anonymous online hate manifestos before enacting solitary attacks as they are to rally in public with swastika flags and white hoods; and narrow representations of visual villains in film and television don’t adequately prepare us for the insidious realities of everyday extremism.
Moreover, when film and television reflect images of “bad racists” as those who wear symbols of prejudice with pride while verbally and physically assaulting people of color, this extreme imagery leads to the false comfort that as long as we’re not acting out with explicit bias, we are not engaged in racism. This good/bad binary limits our understanding of what racism is and how white people participate in it.
Studies done by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity have shown that everyone possesses implicit racial biases, even if they “do not necessarily align with our declared beliefs or even reflect the stances we would explicitly endorse.” So what shapes these implicit biases from an early age? One of many factors is the narrative content we consume in film and television. You don’t have to look far to find racist stereotypes perpetuated on the screen; but some of the most problematic narratives actually emerge out of films that purport to be on the racially progressive “good” side of the spectrum.
For example, the recent Oscar-winning film Green Book was widely criticized for perpetuating the “magical negro” stereotype, offering a buddy comedy in which the one-dimensional wise black character merely serves to help the white man grow in his fully-fleshed-out journey.
Another stereotypical narrative is the “white savior,” as exemplified in The Blind Side: the story of a middle-class white woman who “rescues” a young black man from a world where every black person is rendered impoverished and/or criminal. And she does so by guiding him towards an arena where whites can accept a black man’s success: sports.
While some filmmakers might defend their work by claiming it’s “historically accurate” or “based on a true story,” these defenses shut down the larger conversation about the creative choices storytellers often make to either glorify or simplify human characters along racial lines.
These well-intentioned but ultimately misguided films demonstrate why it is crucial to change the way we dramatize racism in film and television to encompass both the nuanced offenses as well as some guiding light solutions.
In order to effectively challenge racism on screen, here are some actionable story insights for writers.
1. When portraying white supremacist characters, avoid caricatures that allow the audience to distance themselves without self-reflection. Instead, shine a light on the sinister reality of everyday racists and extremists who might not wear their prejudice on their sleeves.
2. When depicting characters engaged in racist behavior, show the subtler ways in which racism operates (e.g. using coded “us” vs.“them” terminology, as when talking about “safe” vs. “sketchy” neighborhoods as a veiled commentary on how many people of color live in these areas) – and have this racism identified and called out by another white character.
3. Write a story arc for a white character who is openly coming to terms with their own white fragility and privilege; and then growing to consciously engage with racism and challenge white supremacy.
4. Portray people of color as fully realized characters with rich inner and outer lives, rather than stunted stereotypes in service of a white character’s journey.
While these story-focused insights are a great jumping off point, I would encourage every writer to do the work not just within their creative writing, but also within themselves. In order to undo centuries of racial conditioning, we need to engage with and internalize more inclusive perspectives. Although the film and television industry is starting to have more active conversations about diversity and inclusion, the 2019 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report shows that only 12.6% of writers and 7.8% of directors are people of color.
For this reason, I offer a few more actionable insights that entail putting down the pen to do some larger work.
Accept that racism is an issue for white people to actively engage with and educate yourself with books like White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, and The New Jim Crow.
Proactively foster both creative and personal relationships across the racial divide.
Advocate for more diversity and representation for people of color behind the camera and on the screen.
If you witness racism on set or in a writers’ room, speak up and make yourself an ally.
Brian McAuley, MFA
WGA Screenwriter
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Columbia University School of the Arts
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers.
Media and Relational Aggression Among Youth
Media and Relational Aggression Among Youth
Does violence in movies and TV increase aggression in children? What about "emotional" violence — taunting, name-calling, cyberbullying, and other forms of social exclusion — the purpose of which is to harm another? Are so-called "mean girls" in TV and movies cool?
As I greeted my fourth-grader off the bus the other day, we began our regular after-school chat between mouthfuls of his afternoon snack.
“What happened at school today?” I ask. “Madison got in trouble with the teacher for being mean to Emily,” he says.
“Oh. What was Madison doing?”
“Well, we were playing this game at recess, but Madison kept changing the rules so that Emily would always lose, or would not know how to play. Emily started to cry and then the teachers came and sent Madison inside.”
It sounds like my son has a mean girl in his class. These types of “mean girl” behaviors — social exclusion, and name-calling — are known as relational aggression. I’ve spent the last decade researching this type of behavior among young people and despite the reputation for relational aggression and its gender bias as something that “mean girls do,” research shows that boys can be just as mean with their friends as girls.
So where do children learn these kinds of relationally aggressive behaviors?
As one might expect, children learn from behaviors modeled to them (e.g. at home or at school). But this also includes TV violence and violence in movies — and, less overt, dramatization of the threat of violence and its power over girls and boys. And the threat of violence is implicit in social exclusion behavior because its purpose is to "remove" a person from the group and even drive that person to harm themselves. Indeed, my research demonstrates that exposure to televised relational aggression is related to children’s use of relational aggression at school.
Unfortunately, relational aggression is quite prevalent in children’s films and television. A study I conducted with Dr. Barbara Wilson, found that 92% of 150 shows that are popular among elementary school children included some form of relational aggression.
Moreover, the ways in which this kind of violence was portrayed in movies and TV increased the chances that children would imitate it. For example, relational aggression was often enacted by attractive perpetrators, who were rarely punished for the actions, and a majority of the relationally aggressive interactions were meant to be funny, which further minimized any potential consequences to the victims.
This is particularly problematic because follow-up studies have shown that relationally aggressive characters tend to be well-liked by children viewers because they are attractive and funny. When children like characters who do antisocial things, they are more likely to excuse the aggression, and as a result, more likely to report they would imitate the behaviors in the future.
Clearly, there is room for improvement when it comes to how we feature relationally aggressive conflicts in children’s media representations.
Here are some actionable insights for storytellers:
When using a relationally aggressive plot point, show the consequences to the victim. Perhaps the victim can verbalize hurt feelings, or the consequences of a false rumor can be shown.
The perpetrator of the relational aggression should be punished in some way. An added bonus: there is research to show that viewers like seeing a disliked perpetrator getting what they deserve.
Avoid rewarding relationally aggressive behavior. For example, a verbal ‘put-down’ should not be used to get a laugh. These kinds of actions are easily imitated by young children, but they are not yet able to understand how and when such a joke should be used.
If storytellers could take some of these steps to avoid portraying relational aggression in an appealing light, it could go a long way in shaping how the millions of impressionable young viewers perceive relational aggression and their subsequent behavior.
Nicole Martins, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Media at Indiana University
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers