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Although past work suggests that having a parasocial relationship with a celebrity can affect attitudes toward that celebrity, no work has yet examined if people are consciously aware that this is occurring and if this can explain the effects of Twitter on attitudes about Donald Trump. The current research examined the psychological mechanisms and attitudinal consequences of engaging with Donald Trump on Twitter and the degree to which people were consciously aware of the effects of their parasocial bond on their attitudes. Across an experiment (N ϭ 243) and two correlational studies (N ϭ 373; N ϭ 384), we found that participants with preexisting political attitudes similar to Trump's showed increased liking of Trump with exposure to his Twitter feed. Those effects were mediated by a parasocial bond. In other words, when people with a political ideology similar to Trump's read his Twitter feed, they felt like they knew him personally (i.e., formed a parasocial relationship with him), which predicted them liking him even more. Conversely, people with political ideologies not similar to Trump's liked him less when exposed to his tweets. Importantly, individuals were unaware that engaging with Trump on Twitter was affecting their views of him. Implications for how the unconscious formation of parasocial relationships may affect attitude polarization and political processes in the modern world are discussed.

No abstract

Most programs for performing discriminant analysis provide a summary table of hits and misses in predicting group membership by using the discriminant function. The interpretation of such tables can be enhanced greatly by computing Cohen's kappa, κ, the chance corrected percentage of agreement between actual and predicted group membership. The standard error of kappa can be used to set confidence limits for the accuracy of the discriminant prediction and to test the difference in predictive accuracy for two independent samples. This was demonstrated in this article, using data previously published in a more preliminary form.