Intimacy despite distance: The dark triad and romantic parasocial interactions

Abstract

Individuals who score high on the dark triad of socially aversive traits—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism—are prone to engage in short-term, non-committal romantic encounters. However, little is known about the transferability of this behavior to these individuals’ intimate interactions with media characters (i.e., romantic parasocial interactions). To close this research gap, we conducted a two-level-between-subjects experiment with young adults in Germany ( N = 116). Our results reveal that, although individuals who score high on the dark triad traits are particularly prone to engage in the specific sub-dimensions emotional love and responses to the media character of romantic parasocial interactions, they are not particularly prone to experience physical love for the media character. Moreover, our results show an alternative negative effect operating through an enhanced tendency to perceive a narrative as “corny” among those with Machiavellian and psychopathic personalities. To underline the similarity between parasocial and real-life romantic interactions, we further investigated the relationship between romantic parasocial interactions and an individual’s perceived relatedness gratification. The results suggest that interacting with and responding to the media character enhance perceived relatedness gratification, but that the romantic connotation of the parasocial interaction is not crucial for the feeling of relatedness during media reception.

Disparate parasocial phenomena evaluation in traditional media and immersive virtual reality

“…As parasocial interaction has been shown a double-edged sword in some respects (for example, the influence of "dark triad" personality traits on parasocial relationships (Liebers & Schramm, 2021) or the impact on self-image at the point of parasocial break-up (Eyal & Cohen, 2006)), if developing parasocial relationships are a goal, specifically, this study presents evidence that an immersive medium may be more effective than a traditional asynchronous media platform.…”

The green side of parasocial romantic relationships: An exploratory investigation of parasocial jealousy.

“…These relationships could be with fictional characters, such as novel protagonists (Liebers & Schramm, 2017) and/or real people, including music artists and actors (Erickson & Dal Cin, 2018). Altogether, research suggests that PSRRs are healthy, adaptive, and rewarding experiences (Liebers & Schramm, 2021; Tukachinsky Forster, 2021).…”