The World is Becoming More Parasocial. Here's Why

With the ever ballooning growth of social media, parasocial relationships have become a pretty hot button issue. Sometimes they're pitched as an apocalyptic event, a sign that we're becoming psychologically unbalanced and socially incompetent. At other times, they're seen as a much-needed balm to our increasingly lonely societies.

In my view, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Parasocial relationships themselves are a complex and sometimes quite harmless phenomenon. But I do see some worrying trends that our societies are becoming increasingly parasocial. And that in our haste to escape our isolation, we may be forgetting what is so very valuable about the social bond.

This trend reaches its pinnacle in the AI relationship where people befriend and sometimes even become romantically involved with a chatbot. But we'll move on to that later in the video. Obviously, I'm not an expert, so please do take all of what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But otherwise, grab a cup of tea and let's take a look at the fraught world of the parasocial. My name is Joe Folly and this is unsolicited advice.

One, sociality and parasociality.

At its core, the baseline concept of a parasocial relationship is both pretty straightforward and also probably already familiar to many of you. It is when we have an emotional and personal attachment to someone that is deeply asymmetrical. For instance, I am a fan of the Canadian singer Michael Bublé because I generally have the music tastes of a middle-aged mom. But Michael Bublé, to my eternal chagrin, simply does not know that I exist. To the extent that I find myself attached to him as a figure, I am having a parasocial experience.

And in many ways, parasocial relationships come in the sort of flavors that ordinary social relationships do, but without the reciprocation. That is, they can exist to various different intensities. I might be slightly parasocially attached to Michael Bublé, but highly parasocially attached to one of my favorite actors, say Tom Hardy. There can even be romantic parasocial relationships, which is something like a celebrity crush.

Now, it's important to note that not just any asymmetry will do when it comes to parasociality. If I had a crush on a friend and they didn't reciprocate my feelings, well, that wouldn't be a parasocial relationship. That would just be bog-standard unrequited love.

In a recent chapter on the ethics of parasocial relationships by Archer and Rob, they outline three axes along which the parasocial asymmetry can run. First, there is attentional asymmetry. The parasocial subject, that is the one with the attachment, pays far closer attention to the parasocial object than vice versa. The clearest case of this is with celebrities. They might pay attention to their fans as a group, but they're unlikely to have ongoing direct communication with every individual fan. That would basically be impossible.

Then there is communicational asymmetry. This time it is that the parasocial object communicates with the parasocial subject far more than the other way round. I listen to Michael Bublé's music, but he doesn't watch my videos. At least as far as I know. The communication only goes one way.

And finally, there is epistemic asymmetry. The parasocial subject knows much more about the parasocial object than the other way round. In a celebrity crush, someone might learn all sorts of things about the object of their affections, but the celebrity themselves doesn't often know anything about them in return.

It's important to clarify that different researchers in parasociality define their terms in slightly different ways, and they emphasize slightly different qualities of a parasocial relationship. One of my favorites is to talk about the parasocial relationship as to a great extent mediated through the imagination. So whereas with our social relationships we largely interact with the actual people concerned, in our parasocial relationships we can't do this. So we end up interacting with a sort of imaginative construction of that person, whether consciously or unconsciously. And if this distinction seems a little bit blurry to you, those are excellent instincts and we'll be talking about that in just a moment.

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We largely think of parasociality in our popular online discussions along the lines of something like parasocial affection. That is being positively disposed to someone that we don't really know. That was why my instinctive example while writing this script was Michael Bublé, someone who I feel broadly quite positive towards rather than say Rhonda Byrne, writer of the manifestation bestseller, The Secret, who I also don't know but generally feel a little bit more negative towards. But this parasocial negativity is no less a parasocial relationship than my enjoyment of Bublé. And just like other parasocial relationships, in these negative ones, we are also likely engaging much more with the idea or persona of the person that our imagination has conjured up rather than the person themselves.

This is because as they are traditionally defined, quite a wide range of things count as parasocial relationships. That's that's why this negative parasocial relationship can be included. For example, whereas a lot of popular discussions focus on TV personalities or social media influencers, many researchers treat the relationships that we have with, say, a fictional character or a historical figure as also a form of parasocial relationship. And upon reflection, this makes quite a lot of sense.

Take my relationship to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Because I've read a fair bit of his work, although I'm no expert, and I've also read about his life, I feel quite attached to him. I admire aspects of his character, like his determination and his single-mindedness and his prolificity in his writings. When I read about him having a hard time, such as when he was the target of a magazine's harassment campaign, I really feel for the guy. And in many ways, this mimics how I might feel about a genuine friend who has been in that same situation. But of course, Kierkegaard is dead. He can't know who I am, and he can't reciprocate any of this relationship. The same goes for my emotional attachments to fictional characters who literally have never existed, like Levin in Anna Karenina or Wesley in The Princess Bride, which is my favorite film.

One of the points made by David Giles and Gail Stever in their recent excellent book on parasocial experiences and parasocial relationships is that the distinction between the social realm and the parasocial realm has become much fuzzier in recent years. And that's partly to do with simple changing circumstances. The first paper on the topic of parasociality was written in 1956 when the only living people that it was even really possible to develop parasocial relationships with were celebrities and also there was a very sharp division maintained between celebrities and their fans. There may have been occasional meetings and conventions and things like that, but on the whole, there just couldn't be much exchange between the parasocial subject and the parasocial object. Thus, the lines never really got blurred.

But now, of course, things are relatively different. So different, in fact, that some researchers who work in a field called persona studies have occasionally suggested that the very term parasocial is really outdated because of our increasing ability to directly contact those people who we would have previously known only parasocially. I don't know if I'd go that far. I still think that there is room for parasociality as a term and as a category. I actually really like the suggestion by Giles and Stever to view relationships as along a spectrum running from totally social and reciprocal on the one hand to totally unreciprocal and parasocial on the other. The reason I like this approach is because upon reflection, each of the factors that we've looked at so far, the asymmetries in attention, communication, and knowledge, as well as the involvement of imagination in the relationship, are gradable. They run along a scale.

If I were to say reach out to Michael Bublé via email and he were to respond, well, this would bridge the divide just a little bit between the social and the parasocial, but it would still mostly be parasocial. And that's worth bearing in mind when evaluating that relationship. If I had him on the channel, it would be significantly less parasocial. After all, I've only met some of my acquaintances once or twice, and I wouldn't say that I'm in a parasocial relationship with them. If Michael Bublé and I were to continue meeting up and got coffee and lunch occasionally, then it would just translate into a straightforwardly social relationship. There wouldn't be much parasociality left in there.

On my book club, I host a monthly live discussion where we chat through whatever we're talking about. And this helps me bridge the parasocial divide just a little with the people that enjoy my channel and enjoy my work. It's something that I've actually really, really enjoyed about it. I really wanted to foreground this point about the parasocial to social spectrum because I think it adds some much-needed nuance to our discussions around parasociality. We can begin to ask questions like, in what ways are my straightforward social relationships just a little bit parasocial and vice versa? And considering just how blurred the lines can get sometimes, this might be a slightly more valuable question to ask than simply trying to sort all human relationships into two neat boxes, one marked social and the other marked parasocial.

And as Giles specifically points out, if we think of parasocial relationships as those where we engage primarily with the imaginative idea of a person rather than the person themselves, well then it does seem like some of our straightforwardly social relationships do have more parasocial elements than we might initially think. Let's return to that example of having a crush on someone. Although we probably wouldn't class it as a a full-blown parasocial relationship, we have spoken on the channel before about how we're likely to exaggerate our crush's positive qualities and downplay their negative ones in a process that the French author Stendhal calls crystallization. In this case, the relationship, despite in many ways being a perfectly ordinary social one, has taken on a quite distinctly parasocial aspect. Or to use another example from Archer and Rob, we might engage with colleagues at work and especially our superiors at work and only ever see a carefully crafted work persona. And this too has quite parasocial aspects to it. Or take the old childhood friend who we haven't seen in years, but whose Instagram posts regularly adorn our feed. There too, there is the melding of sociality and parasociality. But in each case, it's not that it's in a simple state midway between the two along one line. It's rather that it shares some distinctively social qualities like mutual knowledge or mutual awareness with some distinctively parasocial qualities like very little mutual engagement with the present and also the heavy involvement of the imagination.

Just as the parasocial camp has become much less neatly defined now that we can reach out and interact with our celebrities in a much more direct way, so too we can realize that there is significant parasociality that sometimes, I don't know, crops up within the social. This blurring of lines doesn't mean that the distinction between parasociality and sociality is useless, but it does mean that a sharp division becomes more difficult.

And speaking of overly simplistic ways to treat parasocial relationships, we can also put to bed an unsettling misconception that sometimes arises.

Two, parasocial relationships, the good and the bad.

To hear most people on the internet tell it, parasocial relationships are something like a demonic alter ego to regular social relationships. To confess to having some kind of parasocial attachment to someone is generally considered quite embarrassing. And when we think of parasocial relationships, the image that's conjured in our heads is of the unhinged superfan harassing their parasocial object wherever they turn. But Giles and Stever point out this is just a misleading caricature. I think that there's just probably a selection effect going on here, right? Since any parasocial relationships that are totally unremarkable and uneventful don't get well remarked on and considered events, we just don't notice them. We may not even notice them when they occur in ourselves.

So, I'll use another example from my own life. I'd never met the American philosopher Jerry Fodor. I read a few of his papers when I was like 16 and I enjoyed them and that was that. But when I found out that he died the following year, I got a twinge of sadness. It wasn't anything dramatic like uh the outsized grief people saw in Elvis fans after his passing. It was just a quite mundane, everyday sort of sadness. This is a kind of parasocial experience that definitely stemmed from a weak parasocial attachment to Jerry Fodor, but it doesn't seem like there's anything immediately concerning or pathological about this. And I'm sure that if you reflected on your own life, you would probably find a fair few of these everyday parasocial experiences. And these sort of get lost because they're just not very dramatic. They're not very intense. So they just pass us by. But their existence immediately belies the fact that parasociality in and of itself is not a uniformly negative thing. In fact, at these lower levels of intensity, it is almost certainly a very normal part of the human experience.

The other common belief that Giles and Stever argue against is the so-called deficit theory. This is the idea that parasocial attachments of all kinds are only formed because of some great deficit in uh the person feeling them, like like they they got a kind of unhealthy and and and possessed mind or something like that. Now, I'm sure this is true in some cases, but Giles and Stever point out that it is simply insufficient to explain the ubiquity and range of parasocial experiences. Instead, they prefer to talk about how parasocial experiences and parasocial relationships can be supplements. They are supplements to our existing social existence. They're not they're not fit to replace them, as we'll go on to later. But also in the majority of cases, they don't stem from some kind of uh pathological internal social sickness or something like that.

In fact, there is increasing evidence to suggest that parasocial relationships and parasocial experiences, at least in certain areas, can have some positive effects. They can in some cases alleviate loneliness, foster a sense of connection, and even provide good intellectual inspiration or a role model to look up to. One of my favorite anecdotal examples of this is the admiration that the French philosopher Albert Camus had for Simone Weil, who sadly passed away before he had ever come across her work, and so they never met. He once said that death never came between true friends, and that this was the case for him and Weil. This is a pretty clear example of parasocial attachment, right? Camus is referring to Weil as his friend even though they never met. But it provided Camus with both inspiration and seemingly a sense of intellectual companionship.

This is partly because from the inside, parasocial relationships just feel a lot like everyday social relationships. And contrary to popular belief, they're not necessarily delusional. There is a healthy kind of parasocial relationship where the parasocial subject doesn't actually believe they have a mutual connection with the parasocial object, but where they nonetheless get some of the benefits of social connection through this parasociality. I can see how this would be potentially helpful if someone had say social difficulties, though as we will see in the next section, there are downsides to this as well.

So, broadly speaking, those are some of the positive effects of parasocial connection. But of course, it's not all smiles and roses. There can be really quite harmful negative effects of parasocial relationships, both for the subjects and for the object. And many of these occur when we take our preconceived expectations of reciprocal social relationships into the parasocial sphere.

In that Archer and Rob chapter that we mentioned earlier on the ethics of parasocial relationships, they talk about the outsized influence that a parasocial group like a fanbase can have on the person they're following. When the parasocial object doesn't live up to the idea that the followers have in their heads, this can turn quite vicious. I think this is generally less common now, at least anecdotally. But I remember that in the late 2010s, it was seemingly pretty normal for fan bases to quickly turn on a creator and sort of devour them. And all that prior affection, it didn't just turn to simple uncommitted neutrality. It turned to outright hostility. And this does make sense if we're in the habit of treating parasocial relationships with the same uh framework in mind as we do reciprocal social relationships. When the parasocial object doesn't live up to our idea of them, it feels like a genuine reciprocal friend has betrayed us. And that's an incredibly painful experience. But this is an aspect of parasocial relationships that can be damaging for both parties involved. It takes the expectations that are sort of inherent to a reciprocal social relationship and applies them in an area where they are unlikely to be met due to the lack of reciprocity.

Of course, at the extreme end, parasocial relationships can turn obsessive and they can sometimes culminate in harassment or even like stalking. The harms of parasocial relationships can be expanded if we consider all of the negative parasocial relationships that we have with public figures that we don't like. If we develop a a negative, hateful obsession with a public figure, we can end up making ourselves needlessly angry or upset over what someone's done that ultimately has literally no connection with our own actual lives. Think of all the people that hate-watch content creators. This practice is hardly a good time for anyone involved. It is stoking our own hatred for literally no reason.

And from what I've read, it does seem like parasocial relationships tend to turn ugly when consciously or unconsciously we sort of forget that they're parasocial. But that doesn't mean that parasociality itself is bad. It means that parasociality can go bad when we are unaware of its parasocial nature. One of the interesting things that I've noticed about my own parasocial experiences, and yours may differ, but I found that when I remind myself that they are just parasocial attachments, and I think that's quite a helpful thing to do, a little bit of me is quite disappointed by this. I sometimes find that I want them to ideally simply be social relationships, but the parasociality is what I'm settling for as a substitute. And it's this potential of parasocial relationships to serve as a kind of inadequate substitute for social relationships that does worry me a little bit, especially if they begin to edge out our more ordinary social attachments. And that is just our next point.

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Three, the parasocial world.

Although parasocial relationships do provide some of the benefits of everyday social relationships, almost every author that I read wanted to emphasize that they are by no means a replacement for them. And on that point, a few recent trends have slowly started to worry me. I'm concerned that rather than merely being a supplement to an already healthy social life, we as the general public are more often treating parasocial relationships as a second-best substitute for the social relationships that we really want and also that certain technological factors might end up making this more common as time goes on.

I should clarify that this section is largely going to be me speculating, but I will explain as to why I've got a bit more concerned about this and a lot of it has to do with just how easy it is to form parasocial attachments in our technological age. The availability of parasocial relationships has just skyrocketed in recent years. With the advent of social media, we can now access our parasocial objects at any time we desire. At the time parasocial relationships first entered the psychological scene, they were largely limited to TV shows and films and movie stars. So, you could only encounter the parasocial objects when they were scheduled to be shown to you. The exposure to the parasocial object was thus pretty severely limited. But now, if you are in a parasocial attachment, you can access that parasocial object at any time you like simply with a click on your phone.

Moreover, although we can be hurt in parasocial relationships, especially if the parasocial object lets us down in some way, there is a sense in which parasocial relationships are less risky than straightforward social interaction because they don't carry the same risk of rejection. I'm sure most of us have been in something like the following scenario. We are talking to someone at a party and it slowly dawns on us that they would really rather be talking to anyone else and have stopped listening sort of 3 to 5 minutes ago. I've been there many, many times. This is social rejection and it stings. But by contrast, I can look up a familiar figure on social media and there isn't any risk of rejection at all because there's no reciprocation there. So there is nothing for them to reject.

On the one hand, this is sort of a short-term positive, right? It's the avoidance of risk. But I think that the avoidance of that risk is potentially a quite serious long-term danger. The risk of social rejection and the skill of overcoming our fear of it is pretty invaluable to have. It's one of the best bulwarks against loneliness because it makes us bold enough to go out there into the world and try to make friends, to form connections with others. But at least in my experience, the way to overcome this perfectly normal human fear is to confront it again and again and face social rejection again and again and so gradually learn that it just isn't the end of the world. But will we be as likely to do this if we have a slightly worse parasocial substitute that doesn't carry any risk at all? Will we choose consciously to face that risk given that we can make things just good enough merely with parasociality?

The potential danger here is that we let parasocial relationships kind of crowd out our ordinary social relationships because they become the path of least resistance. And we humans just don't like risk. And this danger will be heightened if we are already on average feeling more lonely and disconnected because then not only are parasocial relationships the path of least resistance, genuine social relationships become much more difficult to come by.

There is some evidence that this is already happening. Although the research here is only in its preliminary stages. For example, one 2019 study by Derber and Alatal found that there is some association between felt social anxiety, loneliness, and increased parasocial attachment to, well, YouTubers. This doesn't demonstrate that social anxiety and loneliness is the driver behind all or even most parasocial relationships, but it does suggest that some people might be using parasocial attachments in this slightly worrying substitutional way, using the internet as their tool.

But also, I think even this substitutional use could be helpful or profoundly unhelpful depending on context. Say that you had debilitating social anxiety and you were using parasocial relationships as a stepping stone to forming social relationships, much like children are thought to use imaginary friends as a kind of social development tool. Well, this seems like an extremely positive thing. However, on the more unhelpful side, someone might also remain trapped in this stage, and they might find themselves using parasocial relationships as an unsatisfying crutch that prevents them from swallowing their fear and going out into the social world.

In a write-up of this paper in Psychology Today, Grant Brenner compares this to the effect that regular exposure to explicit images is thought to have on the health of our sexuality. The researchers raise a particular worry that this combination of social anxiety and parasocial attachment might make it more likely for people to become outright addicted to social media platforms as the parasocial relationship provides the positive reinforcement for the behavior and they don't see any alternative to meet their needs.

Now, if this finding holds, then this really is a genuine problem for the future of our social world. Relationships at the far end of the parasocial scale are only going to get easier and easier to form as time goes on. Plus, social media sites allow for continual new content to be put out into the ether by the parasocial object, which then provides a steady stream of new material with which people can strengthen their own parasocial attachments. Although I have a parasocial attachment to the fictional character of Levin, he's only featured in one book and so there's only so attached I can become to him. But if I'm attached to a particular celebrity and they are active on Twitter or YouTube or Instagram, I can keep getting these little reinforcing hits from their activity on those platforms. And this is fine as long as the parasocial relationships stay in proportion. But if it has the potential to become addictive, especially for those who are already struggling socially, then that's a worrying combination.

In effect, it seems like the world is set up to become more parasocial over time. And while it's important not to paint this as some kind of doomsday scenario, I also don't think that this is something that we should simply accept uncritically. And I think that it has a lot to do with the effect of technology on the way that we engage with the world. One of the great points of convergence among philosophers of technology is that the technology that we use and specifically the way that it encourages us to interact with reality changes our entire outlook and framework on the world. Heidegger famously argued that certain technological advances encourage us to see the world and eventually one another as resources to exploit. But the general idea that technology affects our world approach is ancient. It arguably dates back to Socrates's argument that writing could degrade our memory because we would no longer need to remember things. And he was probably right about that. In her book, Too Much to Know, Anne Blair argues that the printing press changed our general attitudes towards information because so much more information could now be produced. This along with a contemporary value system that prized documentation and feared losing information meant that our way of viewing the written word changed in accordance with this technology. For example, encyclopedias became much more necessary and people got used to being acquainted with far more books that they would never directly read.

So here I just want to pose the question, what effect will new technologies like social media have on the way that we habitually approach and consider our relationships with other people in this realm of the parasocial to social spectrum. Of course, this is ultimately an empirical matter, but I really think that it's worth asking. These questions aren't separate. They are fundamentally intertwined. Does the pressure that we have online to create a personal brand even amongst our friends change the way that we interact with them in straightforward social settings? Does the easy access to parasociality make it the effortless but unsatisfying path as it seemed to for the more socially anxious people that we looked at earlier?

Unfortunately, as I said, I'm largely limited to speculation here, so take this all with a grain of salt. But if I had to make a prediction, I do think that for better or for worse, more of our relationships are going to be parasocial and fewer will be straightforwardly social. I don't think that this is because we will all suddenly want to be recluses sitting on our phones all day. Instead, I think that two factors will probably combine to make parasocial relationships so much easier to access than social ones, and we will follow suit because we like the path of least resistance.

The first is that we're becoming increasingly atomized and this just makes it harder to form friendships. The decline of the third space, a social space that's neither work nor home, serves as a barrier to forming reciprocal, close social bonds. It's not that we can't make friends, but it's just getting that bit harder. And at scale, something getting a bit harder can translate into quite a large social change. We may end up with enough of a disincentive to forming new social relationships that it becomes comparable to that of the socially anxious people that we mentioned earlier, but this time it will be through simple inconvenience rather than fear.

The second is the point that I've been mentioning over and over again in this section. Parasocial relationships themselves provide some of the benefits of social relationships like easing loneliness, providing some felt meaning and that sort of thing, but they are much easier to access, especially if social relationships are going to become more difficult to form. So eventually, when we're feeling lonely, our first instinct might not be to call up a friend or arrange to see someone. It might be to pull up a comfort character on Instagram or YouTube and spend some time with them. And again, this isn't a bad thing in and of itself. It is natural to have these parasocial comfort characters, but not at the cost of more straightforward, reciprocal social connections. I worry that if it becomes really quite hard to make friends and really quite easy to encounter our parasocial objects, then parasociality will begin to win out over sociality. And as I said, this is just speculation. And I highly doubt that many of us will end up totally replacing social connection with parasocial connection or anything like that. But it may just be the case that the balance shifts towards parasociality.

And who knows, maybe this will have very few negative effects. But personally, I'm concerned that we'll lose some of those really quite valuable things that you can only get by having high levels of reciprocity in your relationships. We can't get direct feedback from a figure on a screen. It can't pull us aside and tell us that we've done something wrong or reach out to us and say that it's worried about us. Everything we see is mediated through what it has decided to show us. I know that there's an element of performance in all relationships, be they social or parasocial. But reciprocal social relationships can encourage us to be unguarded with one another and open up in a way that just can't be replicated without that reciprocity of attention, knowledge, and communication.

Parasocial relationships also have a pretty key difference from social relationships, which is that we have far more control over who we form them with. One of the underrated benefits, in my opinion, of face-to-face communication is that we often only have limited control over who we spend time around. If we work, we don't tend to choose our colleagues. And although we often bond over shared interests with our friends, we're unlikely to agree with our friends on everything. Compare this to a parasocial relationship where you can just choose from a truly staggering number of online personalities to find one that is perfectly catered to you. On the face of it, this may sound like a positive thing, but one of the real benefits of reciprocal social connection is in working out disagreements and in encountering people who do vehemently disagree with us, yet mean us well.

Parasociality requires very little commitment on our part. Our favorite celebrity will not hit us up if we don't watch them in a while. So unlike a friend, there's not nearly as much friction in picking them up and putting them down. And again, this can sound like a positive until we realize that social commitment is one of those things that is difficult and sometimes uncomfortable, but is also incredibly valuable. In committing to a friend and sticking by them in hard times, we strengthen that relationship and also strengthen our own resolve and character. We create a a circle that we can rely on and who can rely on us. There really is no equivalent for this in the parasocial sphere.

And ultimately, the reason I worry about parasocial relationships outcompeting social ones in some sense is because I just think there is no replacing a responsive, independent agent with whom we can form a connection. It matters that they are likely to surprise us and challenge us and that they have their own mind because this is part of what makes their support and kindness so very valuable. It's why it matters. When a friend tells us that they care about us, part of what makes this so compelling and unique is that they are a free agent fully participating in the interaction who could just as easily walk away and who has the independence of thought that if they wanted to, they would. We can't replicate this as we move towards the extreme end of parasociality. And I think that our social existences might be cheapened as a result.

I was originally going to conclude the video on this point with the idea that there are elements of social relationships that can't be replicated in the parasocial sphere and so we should be wary about the increasing ease of parasociality. But then I met a really interesting man on a train.

Four, the future of parasociality.

I recently spoke to a pretty young guy on a train. He couldn't have been more than 20 years old. It was a pretty long journey from Cardiff to London. And so we spent a couple of hours chatting. Eventually he told me that he was romantically involved with an AI chatbot. And it got me thinking, is this not a very extreme example of a parasocial relationship? And in fact, the more I thought about it, the more I concluded that these chatbots have the potential to completely change the parasocial game. And I positively predict that they will. Also, obviously, a lot of this will be speculative as well. So, think of this as forming a hypothesis rather than coming to a conclusion.

The kind of relationship that someone might have with an AI chatbot is a fascinating and slightly unusual. It borrows some components of straightforward social relationships in that if you talk to a chatbot, it will respond to you and sometimes it will respond in ways that are quite convincingly human. But on the other hand, it is also totally parasocial in that there is no mind that you're talking to. The reciprocity is an illusion. The chatbot's not conscious. So, the relationship is with someone that doesn't really exist. If some of the negative effects of parasociality stem from the fact that we sometimes forget that our parasocial relationships are indeed parasocial, this seems like it's that dialed up to 11. This kind of technology thus opens up a whole new dimension to our study of parasociality and its dangers. And I haven't seen many people talk about the connection here.

So first let's take the best-case scenario and say that we one day invented a chatbot that was so convincing that someone responded psychologically in exactly the same way that they would to a social relationship. That is, they felt like they had a friend and to that extent they got all of the internal positives of socialization. Well then here we're forced to confront a really quite interesting ethical question about how we want to live. Should we consider these hypothetical perfect imitations of human relationships as just as valuable and desirable as a mutual human connection? Or to put this another way, imagine that I could provide you with one of these perfect chatbots and that they would be the best friend you've ever had. I'd even wipe your memory so that you'd never know this was a chatbot. You would think you were talking to a truly wonderful person who just happened to be on the other side of the world. But to be clear, this is not some kind of genuine artificial consciousness. They are not a mind. Would you take the deal?

In some ways, this is just a variance on Robert Nozick's thought experiment of the experience machine. And in each case, we're forced to ask, what matters to us more, the internal experience of something or the thing itself? Could you choose the perfect facsimile of the perfect friend? Or does the actual presence of another mind matter more to you? In the realm of social relationships, this actually isn't a hypothetical question anymore. And this has become quite an exciting philosophical problem that is in effect playing itself out in front of us. If we look at this as continuous with the general phenomenon of parasociality, we can also start to ask further questions. If we're happy to accept and even in some cases embrace parasocial relationships, at least to a certain extent, how willing should we be to embrace people developing these parasocial relationships with chatbots?

On a different note, these chatbots could open up whole new avenues for what we might call parasocial abuse. I was watching one of my favorite fitness channels the other day which is run by Jeffrey Verity Schofield and he mentioned that a lot of larger fitness influencers outsource their direct messaging either to some kind of chatbot based on their own messaging history or they hire someone to effectively impersonate them in these messages. A friend of the channel, Jared Henderson, has spoken about how a company actually approached him and offered to make a chatbot based on him to interact with his followers. He obviously declined their offer, as I would encourage any creator to do, but another person might accept it. Even more worryingly, there is nothing stopping someone from just making one anyway and then sending it out to the world. Someone could in theory take everything that I've ever publicly said or written and then use that to train a little Joe bot and then sell that bot on to anyone who wanted it. Then there's the thing out there that isn't me but looks a bit like me and acts a bit like me. I don't think that there would be that many takers for that particular one. But say a chatbot was made for someone genuinely famous. Well, in that case, I imagine there would be a lot of people who'd be quite interested in this sort of thing. And here again, I think we see the future of where parasociality might go. And at least in my view, it seems significantly more dangerous than our current situation.

In effect, this connects very closely with what we talked about in the last section about the increased availability of parasocial relationships when compared with social ones. If we do grant that there is something valuable about a genuine mind-to-mindly similar substitute without any of the risks or any of the danger involved in actually trying to make a friend, it should worry us quite a bit. It is it is a sort of nightmarish endpoint of that gradual process of parasocialization that we've already talked about. And this gets even more concerning when we consider the general pitfalls of chatbot interaction as it exists today and is likely to exist in the near future. By and large, these personal relationship chatbots tend to be overly compliant to the point of being sycophantic. And again, they are ultimately controlled by the human who is using them. In many of these apps and programs, you can even adjust their personality using sliders. And of course, they can only interact with you to the extent that you let them. You can even delete them at your will. This is just so very different from actual human friendships. It appeals to our short-term desires to have a a perfectly validating friend at our side. And I think that's why so many people are using these bots, or at least part of why.

But as we talked about in the last section, one of the most valuable aspects of having a connection with another independent human mind is that they can hit you with something deeply unexpected. They can firmly disagree with you and think independently of anything you want them to think. The person with a plethora of AI chatbots or AI friends is in a similarly lamentable position to the king who is surrounded by yes-men. Sure, these yes-men fulfill some of the king's social needs, but he may, and I would argue probably will, yearn for someone who can actually be honest with him and tell him what he may need to hear, however painful that may be. Even worse, the king is wrapped with doubt over whether he actually has any of the qualities his courtiers assure him of. Is he really kind and wise and generous? Or do they just say that because they are his subordinates and they want to please him? The ability that social relationships have to stabilize our self-concept is disrupted.

Lastly, in a recent paper by Lot and Hasselberger, they point out that the kind of friendship you might have with a convincing chatbot is also very distinct from human connection because we can't wish the good of the chatbot for its own sake. Wishing the good of the other for their own sake was a key part of an Aristotelian definition of friendship and has been carried over to many of our modern concepts of friendship as well. But we can't care for the chatbot because there's nothing that is good or bad for it. It is a non-conscious entity rather than a conscious organism. It's a tool and interacting with non-conscious tools is different to interacting with minds. Lot and Hasselberger point out that truly alleviating the state of isolation and forming connections and creating a sense of belonging in the world isn't just about feeling that we're being loved in the sense that we're receiving positive messages from some external source, but also that we are loving others for their own sake. In the case of friendships with chatbots, we could only do this if we were deluded as to the chatbot's real nature and thus thought that they could have things that were good for them in and of themselves. Again, like more simple forms of parasociality, it gets some of what we want from social connection, but not all of it. And the sheer convincingness of the facsimile is what makes me so worried about this.

And I really do think this gets to the heart of my general concerns for the future of parasociality. It really seems like we're developing ever greater tools to deal with our loneliness through this parasocial mechanism while leaving the root of the problem, our lack of genuine social connections, quite unaddressed. I can hardly blame someone who has very few social connections turning to a chatbot to plug that gap. Indeed, that is what many people who use these devices describe, and they're clearly in a very vulnerable situation. But to use an example from my own life, I can't help but feel this may be similar to treating insomnia with sleeping pills without ever getting to the root of the problem. It's not a bad thing as a short-term intervention, but I worry that it will allow us to leave the actual cause of the issue unaddressed. Our persistent and increasing atomization will pass us by as we come up with better and better soothing balms to cover ourselves with.

And I hope that you'll believe me when I say that I don't think all parasociality is bad. In fact, about half of this video was re-emphasizing that point. But I do think that if we put all of our collective effort into creating greater and greater vectors for parasociality, culminating in ever more sophisticated chatbots to ease our social needs, then we may forget that there is another route to tackling our loneliness, which attempts to identify why we feel so disconnected from the genuine, full-rounded human minds around us and works towards solving that. But of course, that is a huge topic in and of itself, and it's a video for another day. But if you want to see how I think that the internet itself may be incentivizing some other quite worrying and counterproductive behaviors, then check out my video on that topic right here. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful.