Horton & Wohl: The Classic Lego

Research into parasocial interactions between television audience members and characters they see on television has an extensive history. Horton & Wohl (1956) provided the largely descriptive yet seminal work on parasocial interactions.

Actors and audiences both have roles to fill and relationships are achieved through building a bond of intimacy. Horton & Wohl (1956) note that the mass media give viewers (and listeners) an illusion of face-to-face communication with the performer, and call this “seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship” (p. 215). The performer is a “persona,” and the persona works within various technical devices to make a continuing and regular connection with the audience. This connection is achieved when the performer successfully duplicates the gestures and conversational style their character would use in a social situation to create the illusion of intimacy. The authors also discuss breaking through the fourth wall, but they treat it as a general goal rather than a gimmick. For talk shows, they may be correct, but for fictional programming, their assessment does not generally apply.

The authors argue that producers use numerous devices to coach audience attitudes, such as face-to-face interactions between the studio audience and a persona; technicians, guests, and professional assistants acting as subordinates to the persona, reading excerpts from fan mail. Within this complex set of relationships among actors, the audience is coached through a type of showbiz propaganda to support the show and actors in whatever way the producers see fit. A key point made by Horton & Wohl (1956) links television viewing to social learning theory:

The spectator is instructed variously in the behaviors of the opposite sex, of people of higher and lower status, of people in particular occupations and professions. In a quantitative sense, by reason of the sheer volume of each instruction, this may be the most important aspect of the para-social experience, if only because each person’s roles are relatively few, while those of the others in his social world are very numerous. In this culture, it is evident that to be prepared to meet all exigencies of a changing social situation, no matter how limited it may be, could – and often does – require a great stream of plays and stories, advice columns and social how-to-do-it books. (p. 222)

Some fans become dissatisfied with mediated PSRs and seek to make contact with the actual persona. Fan mail is a measure of this, as well as fan clubs. The fan desires some sort of “real reciprocity which the para-social relation cannot provide” (p. 227). Cohen (2003), for example, argues that parasocial relationships lack the intensity of behavioral components of real-life relationships but exhibit many of the emotional aspects.

Horton & Wohl (1956) also suggested that people get to play roles in parasocial interactions that they do not normally get to play in real-life. Therefore, parasocial relationships offer a means of compensation for lack of some types (or even all types) of social interaction. Indeed, for most people, “the parasocial is complementary to normal social life … it provides a social milieu in which the everyday assumptions and understandings of primary group sociability are demonstrated and reaffirmed” (p. 223). Others who suffer from loneliness may seek out a sense of sociability through parasocial relationships with TV personae, and television producers are quite aware of this segment.

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Madison, T.P. (2011). Horton & Wohl: The classic Lego. Phil's Dissertation Lego Box. Retrieved (DATE) from (LINK).