Review of General Psychology 2012 American Psychological Association

2012, Vol. 16, No. 2, 144 151 1089-2680/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0027909

Blinded by the Starlight: An Evolutionary Framework for Studying

Celebrity Culture and Fandom

Charlotte J. S. De Backer
University of Antwerp

Seeing is believing. Historically, print media has used visual illustrations to add credibility to their texts.
The power of visuals is indeed stronger than the power of words. Even though pictures can be
manipulated to not portraying any truth, we more easily believe what we see, compared with what we
hear or what we read. Visual representations of reality create the false belief as if we witness the situation;
an eye-witness perception translates into an I-witness emotional response. From an evolutionarily point
of view, this can be labeled as a mismatch outcome of evolved psychological mechanisms. Adaptations
to deal with situations that existed in our evolutionary past are being triggered by modern artifacts that
might not be fitness-relevant themselves, but look a lot like fitness-relevant cues from the past. A classic
example is, for instance, a fear reaction upon encountering a water hose that looks a lot like a snake. In
a similar fashion, pictures, being visual representations of the world, look a lot like personal perceptions
of the real world and might trigger mental mechanisms to deal with problems associated with this world.
Applying this to understand the worship of stars, the author explains how mainly visual stimuli contribute
to the formation of parasocial (one way) bonds between stars and their audience. The author draws on
theories from the social sciences (communication studies, politics, and sociology), psychology, econom-
ics, and evolutionary biology, first to explain the field of celebrity or star studies, second to address the
importance of visuals in the production of stars, and finally to explore why audiences worldwide tend to
become emotionally involved with individuals they encounter on screens, with whom any form (or
possibility of) physical interaction is highly unlikely.

Keywords: celebrity, stardom, visual, parasocial relationships, imagery

Video killed the radio star. Pictures came and broke your heart.The
Buggles, 1979
In 1979 the British band The Buggles released their hit song,
Video Killed the Radio Star, telling the story of a singer whose
career is cut short by the rise of TV. In reality, radio presenters
have not yet been replaced by TV presenters, and may never be,
but if both types of stars were placed on a scale of fame, the
video stars would indeed outscore the radio stars. The majority of
TV characters become bigger stars than many radio presenters. In
what follows, I outline an interdisciplinary theoretical framework
that explains this phenomenon.
I draw on theories from the social sciences (communication
studies, politics, and sociology), psychology, economics, and evo-
lutionary biology, first to explain the field of celebrity or star
studies, second to address the importance of visuals in the produc-
tion of stars, and finally to explore why audiences worldwide tend
to become emotionally involved with individuals they encounter
on screens, with whom any form (or possibility of) physical
interaction is highly unlikely.
No new empirical research will be used to support this work, but
the article concludes with a number of specific hypotheses and
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Charlotte
J. S. De Backer, Department of Communication Studies, University of
Antwerp, De Meerminne, Sint Jacobstraat 2, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium.
E-mail: charlotte.debacker@ua.ac.be
methodological suggestions for translating this theoretical frame-
work to empirical research.
Celebrities, Stars, and Your Renowned Neighbor:
Unraveling the World of Stardom
First, it is important to define what a celebrity is. Studies on
stardom cover a wide range of topics and different types of
individuals; several different types of stars fall under this umbrella.
Although Charles Darwin, for example, is considered to be a
person of great importance and influence, we would hesitate to
define him as a celebrity. A scientist may be a star within a certain
academic discipline but would not be called a celebrity. Similarly,
Vincent Van Gogh has been world famous for over a hundred
years but is not referred to as a celebrity. The same applies for
many important historical figures, such as Julius Caesar and Al-
exander the Great. When thinking about celebrities, we think about
people from the modern entertainment industry who have become
well-known for their work or actions, such as Angelina Jolie or
Justin Bieber (at least at the time of writing). What defines a
celebrity, though?
In order to answer this question we should start at a more
general level, by first explaining stars and stardom, driven by a
process of fame. Therefore, in what follows I will discuss (a) the
reason for fame (for what a celebrity is known), (b) the level of
fame (how famous a celebrity is), and (c) the duration of fame (for
how long a celebrity is famous) and show how all of these factors
determine whether a person can be defined as a celebrity. This

144
 BLINDED BY THE STARLIGHT
introduction will outline a number of evolutionary theories, as this
perspective will become important in the next section where an
explanation of why we admire stars is attempted. An initial level
of background knowledge regarding the general field of star stud-
ies will be helpful in understanding the range of people to which
this framework can be applied.
As far as the reason for fame is concerned, it appears that almost
anything is possible. Some stars are famous because they can sing,
others because they are confused as to whether tuna is a kind of
fish or a kind of chickenthis is how Jessica Simpson became a
celebrity in 2003 in the show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica.
Generally speaking, three key paths to stardom have been estab-
lished in the literature (Rojek, 2001): Fame comes by way of
inheritance; some are born famous, such as royals, and possibly
also the children of famous parents. Second, fame can be achieved,
through excelling at a certain skill; these individuals may play
football, sing, dance, talk, cook, swim, write, and so forth better
than the majority of other people. Third, fame may be ascribed to
certain individuals, simply because a crowd of peoplean audi-
encepays attention to them or at least to their actions. Many
reality TV stars fall into this last category. The difference between
achieved and ascribed stardom is that fame is a by-product in the
first case and a goal in the latter. Stars who become famous
through their achievements do not aim to become famousthey
simply excel in a certain domain, and fame is the result. Stars who
become famous through audience attention, however, tend to have
fame as a goal and appear to be willing to go to great lengths to
attain it, such as by potentially embarrassing participation in a
reality TV show, for instance.
As we have seen, stardom can therefore be achieved through
inheritance, hard work, or through attracting public attention. It is
also true, however, that an individual may be born in a locally
renowned family, be the best singer in the neighborhood and
attract high levels of attention but still never become a celebrity.
This person would very likely be renowned in his or her neigh-
borhood and social network, but to become a celebrity, a further
level of recognition must be achieved beyond the limits of the
personal social network. As Rojek (2001) explained, the term
renown refers to a form of localized fame that relies on the
recognition of an audience at only a small distance socially from
the renowned individual. An encounter, or at least the possibility
of an encounter, between stars and their audience is possible. Only
when recognition is attained beyond the borders of low social
distance can a person of renown be redefined as a celebrity. For
reasons I outline below, however, I label the latter group as
well-known people for now. For well-known people, compared
with renowned people, the number of people who would recognize
them without having met them face to face or even having the
opportunity to do so is significantly larger than the number of
people who know and (potentially) meet them in real lifethat is,
the people from their local social network.
Recognition is key factor in the phenomenon of celebrities, as is
neatly summed up in Boorstins (1961) famous statement that the
celebrity is a person who is well-known for their well-knownness
(p. 58). Although it could be argued that this circular definition
does not clarify exactly what a celebrity is, it does capture the
essence of what makes a person a celebrity: recognition. The more
people recognize an individual, the more fame can be attributed to
that person and the bigger star that individual becomes. A theory
145
that may explain the underlying fundamentals of this idea is the
recognition heuristic.
Humans have a natural tendency to attribute higher status to
people and objects they recognize compared with people and
objects they do not recognize. Goldstein and Gigerenzer (1999)
illustrated this with a number of experiments in which respondents
were asked to rank cities according to their population size. Their
results showed that people rank cities they recognize higher than
cities of which they had not previously heard. Using recognition to
rank objects was found to be a fast and economical way to decide
which of two items had a higher value. The recognition heuristic
for such tasks is simply stated: If one of two objects is recognized
and the other is not, then infer that the recognized object has the
higher value (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999, p. 41).
In a similar sense, this recognition heuristic can be applied to
human beings: Individuals attribute higher status to other individ-
uals they recognize compared with individuals they do not recog-
nize. We also attribute more status, or prestige, to those who are
known by many, compared to those who are known by fewer
people. This may explain why higher levels of prestige are often
attributed to international stars than to national stars.
Finally, to ensure definition as a celebrity, an individual should
be well-known for a sufficient amount of time. An individual may
receive significant media attention for several days, for example, if
they win the lottery, but if this attention does not continue the
individual will not become a celebrity. On the basis of the duration
of well-knownness, I further divide the group of well-known
people into three subgroups: celetoids, celebrities, and icons. Cele-
toids have achieved, or have been attributed, a certain amount of
fame, but this fame is short-lived (Rojek, 2001). Examples of
celetoids may include a man who has won the lottery, a woman
who has killed her husband and lover, or a girl who has fallen from
a rooftop and survived; they are ordinary people who become
famous for a short period of time. Celebrities are people who are
very well-known for longer periods of time, most often throughout
their lifetimes. For the sake of this definition, however, a celebrity
is a living famous person; after death, a celebrity becomes an icon.
An icon embodies only the public image of the celebrity as they
were during their lifetime. Living celebrities are both the public
image, which can exist beyond death, and the physical body that
feeds this public image, and that is constrained by time.
As sociologist George Herbert Mead explained, every individual
consists of an I and one or more mes. The I refers to the
subjective self, and the me refers to the individual as perceived
by others (Reck, 1964). Applying this to the concept of what a
celebrity is, celebrities embody both the public self, constructed by
themselves as well as by the entertainment industry and their
audience (me), and also the person behind that image (I). In de
Saussures (1960) semiotic terms celebrities consist both of the
signified, which refers to the actual physical person, which we
term the celebrified, and the signifierthe public image, or ce-
lebrifier, created both by the media and the audience. As regards
icons, the celebrifier is what remains when the celebrified has
passed away. Lady Diana Spencer, for example, was a worldwide
celebrity when she was alive, and she retained her status as a star
even after she died. The celebrifier was gone, but the celebrified
prevailed. Lady Di became an icon, resembling what Diana had
been when she was alive, as a celebrity.
146 DE BACKER
In conclusion, as far as defining celebrities and other types of
famous individuals is concerned, I propose the use of the term star
to describe an individual who has reached a given level of fame.
Their stardom may have been inherited, achieved, or attributed.
These individuals can be active in various domains, such as in
sports, movies, music, and so on (Principle 1). Their level of fame,
determined by the number of people who recognize them and have
the opportunity to meet them face to face as opposed to the number
of people who recognize them but have no opportunity to meet
them face to face, further divides the group of stars into renowned
and well-known people. The first type of star is only known among
individuals within his or her local social network, whereas the
latter type of star is known beyond this level, by individuals at a
greater social distance from the star (Principle 2). On the basis of
life stage criteria, I further separate well-known people into the
categories of celetoids, celebrities, and icons (Principle 3). Every
well-known star starts as a celetoid, by achieving or inheriting
fame, or by having fame attributed to them. During this initial
stage, it could be argued that their own concept of self, the
celebrifier, is more important than their public image, the celebri-
fied. If, over time, the celebrified becomes more significant than
the celebrifier, celetoids become celebrities. This may best be
considered as a continuous process, due to the difficulty of pin-
pointing when exactly this transformation takes place. When the
celebrifier passes away and only the celebrified remains, the ce-
lebrity becomes an icon. An overview of this categorization is
given in Figure 1.
When it comes to defining who is a celebrity, the increase in
recognition needed to become well-known as opposed to re-
Figure 1. A classification of stars.
nowned is undoubtedly the most important factor. Being recog-
nized by large numbers of people is an indicator of fame, and this
can be achieved faster and more permanently for video stars than
radio stars. To understand why video has lessened the recognition
of the radio star, I turn now to the power of visuals and examine
the relevant evolutionary theory.
Eye-WitnessI-Witness: The Effect of Visuals on Our
Stone-Age Brains
With Baby Suri, Seeing Is Believing (MSNBC;
September 12, 2006)
In 2006, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes released a written
statement confirming that their daughter Suri had been born on
April 18, but for months the couple refused to release a picture of
her. Worldwide media speculation over the existence or nonexis-
tence of the baby followed, as people seemed reluctant to believe
that the baby was real without having seen photographic evidence.
In September the proof (and relief) finally came, when the first
pictures of baby Suri appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. A
picture is worth a thousand words, and in this and many other
celebrity gossip cases, one picture sells (or sold) more than a
thousand words ever could (Vanity Fair allegedly paid millions of
dollars to obtain the rights to publish baby Suris first pictures, and
their website received a record 4.3 million hits in just one day, far
exceeding their daily average of 60,000 hits).
Throughout history, people have attempted to boost their rec-
ognition by means of visual communication. Even in ancient
 BLINDED BY THE STARLIGHT
times, long before video or photography was invented, means
other than word of mouth were sought to elevate recognition.
Alexander the Great, for example, who has often been referred to
as the first true celebrity (Giles, 2002), boosted his recognition by
having his face reproduced on ornaments. Statues of Alexander the
Great were strategically placed in public places; his image was
stamped on bracelets, dinnerware, ornaments, and coins (Holt,
2003). People who had never met him recognized his face, and he
became familiar, and it was this physical recognition that contrib-
uted to the first enormous claim to fame in history. The depiction
of famous faces on coins and banknotes is still widespread today,
but the visual representation of individuals occurs on a much larger
scale in various highly visual mass media formats.
Today, the media reproduces interactions between media char-
acters and their audiences on a very large scale, and it is this
mass-mediated production of culture that has created the age of
celebrity we live in, according to Braudy (1997). Celebrities are no
recent phenomenon, but their numbers, and the extent to which
they are known, have increased dramatically since the introduction
of mass-mediated visuals. Despite the great physical distances
between contemporary stars and the majority of their audiences,
the emotional connection that audiences feel with celebrities re-
mains strong.
As soon as pictures of a star enter our daily lives, we may have
the impression that he or she belongs to our personal social
network despite living on the other side of the world. Video did not
kill the radio star: Video gave birth to the age of celebrity as we
know it today. The question remains, however: Why did visuals
became so important from a consumer perspective? Those who
aim to become well-known might use pictures to boost their
visibility and gain more prestige. Why, though, do we as an
audience respond more strongly to pictures than to nonvisual
information about stars?
The proximate explanation for this is that visuals add credibility:
Seeing is believing. Before photography was developed in the
early 1800s, engravings were used to illustrate texts in newspapers.
From the middle of the 19th century onward, picture papers were
enjoying popularity across Europe and in North and South Amer-
ica (Goldberg, 1993). Pictures add credibility to a text because
they enhance the audiences experience of an event, perhaps even
allowing them to feel that they personally witnessed it. According
to Bird (1992), this credibility factor is the reason why tabloids and
gossip magazines in particular have very high proportions of visual
content: Pictures are needed to increase the trustworthiness of
many of their less accurate stories. For similar reasons, tabloid and
gossip magazine stories are often presented in interview format, so
that readers have the impression that they are receiving the infor-
mation firsthand. Another technique is to state that the information
comes from sources close to the celebrity. The truth can easily be
distorted with words, and although pictures can beand are
manipulated, they retain a sense of authenticity that leads audi-
ences to believe that what they are seeing is reality. Our brains may
interpret mediated visual information in a similar way to real-life
visual information: We experience what we see as if it really
happened, as if I witnessed the situation, as if I was there. irrelevant, because plastic spiders, snakes, and other predators are
Eye-witness observation equates to an I-witness feeling.
From an evolutionary psychological perspective, this eye-
witnessI-witness phenomenon is not entirely surprising. Though
mediated visual information has existed for over 200 years, this is
147
but a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. When we also bear in
mind that selection is a slow process that requires many genera-
tions to produce changes in the way our mind processes informa-
tion (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994), we can assume that our minds as
they exist today are not sufficiently adapted to interpret the mass-
mediated environment we live in properly. The evolutionary en-
vironment of adaptedness (EEA) refers to the environment to
which a species is adapted. Every species faced specific reproduc-
tive problems, different from other species, because they lived in
different environments or because their way of living was differ-
ent. Reproductive problems are tasks a species must undertake to
secure its survival and reproductive success, such as finding food,
finding mates, and so forth. The EEA is important in the context of
explaining functional properties, such as psychological mecha-
nisms, because these arise during the process of natural selection
(see Hagen, 1999 2002). The EEA of our psychological mecha-
nisms is best located in the Pleistocene, when our ancestors lived
as hunter gatherers. Our ancestors lived in this way for approxi-
mately 99% of our evolutionary past (Hawkes, OConnell &
Rogers, 1997), having inevitable repercussions for our minds
current mechanisms. Modern societies inevitably differ dramati-
cally from this Pleistocene environment. Mass-mediated visual
stimuli (pictures, videos), for example, simply did not exist in the
environment that shaped our psychological mechanisms, which
may go some way toward explaining the difficulties we encounter
with interpreting and responding to them appropriately.
Even though many modern phenomena did not exist in the
Pleistocene, some of them do resemble objects or stimuli that were
present in that era, such as plastic animals made to appear as
realistic as possible. Consequently, it may be the case that certain
psychological mechanisms, shaped by the Pleistocene environ-
ment, are triggered (activated) by modern phenomena. Such mis-
matches between our psychological mechanisms, rooted in the
past, and cues we encounter in the modern environment may help
to explain behaviors that would otherwise make no sense in
evolutionary, fitness-enhancing terms. Such mismatches may have
irrelevant or maladaptive outcomes.
An example of a maladaptive outcome of the activation of our
psychological mechanisms in modern society is our craving for
sugar and fatty foods. The difference in access to calories in the
modern environment and access to calories in our ancestors
environment is, undeniably, significant. In the Pleistocene, food
was sometimes scarce, and our ancestors strategy of consuming
all or most of the food they came across was adaptive: It secured
their survival and reproductive success. Today, calories are easy
accessible: All we have to do is enter a supermarket. Consuming
all or most of the calories available to us has become a maladaptive
strategy: It results in poor health. Obesity is a major health prob-
lem in modern societies and is an example of a maladaptive
outcome of an adaptation that was once beneficial (Gaulin &
McBurney, 2004).
An example of an irrelevant outcome of the triggering of a
psychological mechanism by a modern object is the fear we
experience when we see a plastic spider or snake. This fear is
harmless. However, the fear makes sense when we consider the
EEA that shaped our psychological mechanisms: Snakes, for ex-
ample, were a common threat to the survival and reproduction of
our ancestors, and it is perhaps not surprising that we still possess
148 DE BACKER
psychological adaptations that lead us to react to snake-like objects
in a rather extreme way. The psychological mechanisms that cause
a fight-or-flight reaction in the context of a perceived threat (see
Ledoux, 1998) can be compared to a smoke alarm: As Nesse and
Williams (1994) pointed out, the principle of a smoke alarm is to
be oversensitive to danger. In other words, they are designed along
the principle that it is better to react to large numbers of false
alarms than not to react to actual danger. It is assumed that many
of our psychological mechanisms also work in this waythat it is
better that our fight-or-flight mechanisms are triggered too often
than not at all. In threatening situations, this would have been an
advantage for our ancestors and explains why certain associations
are learned more easily than others, known as preparedness
(hman & Mineka, 2001).
Similarly, it may be that mass-mediated visuals trigger evolved
psychological mechanisms that were developed to deal with real-
life visual input, just as plastic snakes might trigger an evolved fear
reaction to real snakes. In the same way that a plastic snake looks
as if it were a real snake, mass-mediated visuals look as if they
were real, leading to the experience of eye-witnessed information
as an I-witnessed situation. This may explain why people become
aroused by pornography (e.g., Salmon, 2005), and why people feel
emotions associated with friendship, or even rivalry, when regu-
larly exposed to pictures of stars.
To sum, visuals are added to written data to increase the believ-
ability of the information given, and this is the proximate expla-
nation for their abundant presence in many contemporary media
formats. The advent of visual stimuli introduced representations of
reality that unintentionally constituted a new environment for their
audiences one that activates our emotions. Pictures seem to
trigger ancient psychological mechanisms that were evolved to
deal with the world as observed through our eyes. A key factor in
this new environment is the individuals we begin to regard as
friends: stars.
I Witness, I Feel: How Visuals Add (Parasocial)
Friends to Our Social Network
TV Is Providing Artificial Friends and Relatives to
Lonely PeopleKurt Vonnegut
I agree that when Diana died it touched the world, and as I told
my son, when Diana died the world cried (Lorraine Clifford,
Australia; BBC News; January 16, 1998). The death of Diana,
Princess of Wales in 1997 caused an outpouring of emotion around
the world. Investigating this phenomenon, Brown, Basil, and Bo-
carnea (2003) noticed that peoples level of involvement with
Diana prior to her death influenced the effect that media messages
about her death had on them. In the conclusion of their study, they
suggested that future research was necessary to further analyze
cases such as this because of the growing impact of celebrities on
their audiences.
The relation between stars and their audiences is typically
characterized by a lack of feedback in interactions. Stars play out
their private lives in public (often unwillingly), and the public
produces an emotional reaction to this, such as the period of public
mourning following Dianas death. Feedback is lacking in the
sense that the public or audience cannot easily reveal their private
lives to the stars, and emotional responses of stars toward their
audiences, again, are rather exceptional. Because of the one-way
nature of information and emotion in these interactions, they are
termed parasocial (e.g., Caughey, 1984; Giles, 2002; Horton &
Wohl, 1956; Rubin, Perse, & Powell, 1985).
Research suggests that parasocial relationships should be seen
as an extension of consumers social lives, rather than compensa-
tion for a lack thereof. If the latter were true, people who lack
intimacy or have trouble with intimacy in their real lives should
have strong parasocial bonds as compensation, but studies inves-
tigating how parasocial relationships function have shown that the
first case (extension) is more likely (Cohen, 2004). However,
although they do not replace real interactions, parasocial relation-
ships do help to boost self-esteem among consumers with low
self-esteem (Derrick, Gabriel, & Trippin, 2008). Favorite TV pro-
grams also decrease feelings of loneliness and low mood among
average individuals (Derrick, Gabriel, & Hugenberg, 2009).
In fact, the one-way processes of parasocial relationships feature
dynamics that are very similar to patterns typical of real-life
relationships. Just as we feel distressed by the thought that we
might lose a friend, we tend to feel the same emotion when our
favorite TV characters are about to be taken off air, for example,
when a show is about to stop production (Cohen, 2004; Eyal &
Cohen, 2006; Lather, 2011). Furthermore, the level of intimacy
established with same-sex friends in real life correlates with the
level of intimacy experienced with parasocial friends, which
means that the closer a persons real-life relationships are, the
closer their parasocial relationships will be (Greenwood & Long,
2011). Remark, however, that this does not hold for romantic
relationships, where individuals who are single report greater
imagined intimacy with media characters than individuals who are
in a relationship (see Greenwood & Long, 2011).
If we consider the parasocial relations between stars and their
audience within the framework of the eye-witnessI-witness the-
ory described above, a possible explanation for why this phenom-
enon occurs is outlined by Barkow as follows:
The mass media may activate the psychological mechanisms that
evolved in response to selection for the acquisition of social informa-
tion. [. . .] We see them in our bedrooms, we hear their voices when
we dine: If this hypothesis is correct, how are we not to perceive them
as our kin, our friends, perhaps even our rivals? As a result, we
automatically seek information about their physical health, about
changes in their relative standing, and above all about their sexual
relationships. (Barkow, 1992, pp. 629 630)
Our minds process visuals of stars as if they are proof that these
individuals are part of our social networks. We meet stars every
day, and though the encounters are not real, our minds process the
encounters in the same way as if they were real.
In my opinion, visuals play the most important role in this
process. Of course, hearing and reading about stars may produce
similar results, also triggering our minds to interpret stars as if they
were members of our social networks. Readers often establish
bonds with fictitious characters in books, and Zunshine (2007)
argued that the reason we read fiction might be created and driven
by the cognitive cravings of our stone-age minds, similar to the
phenomena outlined above. Still, the power of the mass media
visuals seems to have stronger effects. From an evolutionary
perspective, people who our ancestors heard about but never saw
 BLINDED BY THE STARLIGHT
were not members of their personal social network. These were
part of their extended social network (friends of friends). People
they had heard of but never seen were, therefore, not as close to
them as people whose faces were familiar.
Even today, in the realm of real interpersonal connections, the
bonds we have with close friends with who we interact and meet
face to face are much stronger than the bonds we have with people
we have heard about or read about but never met face to face.
People go to great lengths to see each other when interacting: They
fly to the other side of the world for conferences, meetings, and
personal visits. In addition, when we communicate through a
medium such as the telephone or Internet, we tend to add visual
cues to these interactions such as pictures or video, simply because
images imply closeness (Kirk, Sellen, & Cao, 2010). Visuals
create the illusion of an encounter.
In this context, it is interesting to consider David Giless (2002)
framework for studying parasocial relationships. Giles pointed out
that a distinction must be made between different types of para-
social bonds, based on the potential for encountering the media
characters involved. What he labeled first-order parasocial inter-
action involves media characters who address the audience di-
rectly, such as talk show hosts. Linking this to what I discussed in
the introduction, the celebrified and celebrifier in this case do not
differ significantly from each other. Second-order parasocial in-
teractions occur with media characters who are to some degree
inauthentic (such as fictitious soap characters) but who have a
real-life counterpart nevertheless. Here the celebrified and celebri-
fier are distinct, but the celebrifier guarantees potential for encoun-
tering the star. Third-order parasocial interactions, on the other
hand, involve fantasy or cartoon characters who have no real-life
counterpart at all. Here, no celebrifier exists only the celebrified.
Technically speaking, icons would therefore fall under this cate-
gory.
Giles (2002) expected parasocial interactions to be strongest
with the first group, and weakest with the fantasy characters and
proposed further investigation of this hypothesis. However, Nabi,
Stitt, Halford, and Finnerty (2006) compared audiences emotional
reactions to reality shows and fictional programming, and they
noticed that parasocial relationships were stronger for fictional
programming. Their results might contradict Giles assumptions,
but they do not appear particularly strange in the context of the
eye-witnessI-witness perspective outlined above. The evolution-
ary framework supports the idea that parasocial interactions may
be equally strong among first-order, second-order, and third-order
interactions, as long as the characters involved are all portrayed
visually in the media, that is, as long as the celebrified is main-
tained, because it is that cue that triggers our emotions. Moreover,
the eye-witnessI-witness paradigm allows us to predict that a
second-order or even third-order parasocial interaction with a
visual media character (such as a fictitious movie character) where
visuals are present may be stronger than a first-order parasocial
interaction (e.g., with a real radio newscaster) where visuals are
absent.
I agree with Giles that we can expect certain third-order para-
social interactions to be lower in intensity because of the unreal-
istic portrayal of these characters. Although realistic visuals might
trigger our stone-age minds to perceive media characters as part of
our social networks, cartoons and other unrealistic images are
unlikely to have the same effect. As explained earlier, selection led
149
our psychological mechanisms to function in a similar way to
smoke alarms: It is better that they are activated too often than too
little. Of course, there are still limits. Smoke detectors will respond
to smoke from a cigarette, but if they were to be activated by the
smoke of a candle, for example, they would be too sensitive to use.
In a similar sense, we could argue that realistic pictures of people
might activate emotional mechanisms developed to operate in
face-to-face interactions, but cartoons of people might no longer
have the same effect on our minds. Future research should inves-
tigate where the boundaries lie between visuals that have the
power to affect us and those that do not.
In conclusion, it is my belief that an evolutionary framework
offers a useful platform for developing hypotheses and frame-
works for studying parasocial relationships. Relevant areas of
study for these relations are growing every day. As we now live in
an age of cyberspace and Web 2.0, it will also be important to
extend the above theory to relationships with online characters
who may require entirely different categorization to stars. If visual
information is present, the people we meet online or at least people
renowned in the online community should elicit similar responses.
It has been illustrated that parasocial bonds can even occur be-
tween individuals and their personal avatar in online games. Peo-
ple who score highly on interdependent self-construal (an individ-
uals sense of self in relation to others), in particular, tend to
establish stronger parasocial bonds with their virtual self, as rep-
resented by an avatar (Jin & Park, 2009).
Discussion
Seeing is believing. The media have long used visuals to illus-
trate written information and add credibility to the content of the
message, and the power of visuals remains strong. Despite that
pictures can now be manipulated, we continue to believe what we
see more easily than what we hear or read. Visuals create the false
belief that we have actually witnessed an event. From an evolu-
tionary psychological perspective, which states that our human
minds were shaped in a context in which visuals did not yet exist,
I put forward the eye-witnessI-witness theory to explain the
power of visuals. Visual representations of life closely resemble
real life, as directly perceived with our eyes, in the same way that
pictures of people closely resemble real people directly perceived
with our eyes. Given that our minds have been shaped by the
process of evolution and are not yet sufficiently adapted to process
visual stimuli as different from real-life input, it is perhaps not
surprising that we are led to believe that we have really experi-
enced the events portrayed in the images we consume. This phe-
nomenon may explain why audiences become emotionally at-
tached to celebrities and other stars they encounter on screen.
This article presented a theoretical framework for examining the
field of star studies, for explaining why various media formats are
so rich in visual information, and for clarifying why an abundance
of images portraying humanlike beings may lead us to interpret
such media characters as part of our social networks. Further
research is needed to empirically test the ideas. Some specific
assumptions that should be tested are: If in situations with no
visual stimuli, the bonds between stars and their audiences will be
less strong than in situations where visual stimuli are present
(Assumption 1). Because, if human minds process visual input
according to the general idea put forward, that people we see are
150 DE BACKER
people we meet, then we might expect that repetitive visual en-
counters with media characters will result in the establishment and
development of strong parasocial bonds between stars and their
audiences. On an emotional level, audiences will perceive stars as
being part of their closest social networks. Moreover, although
these parasocial bonds may also be created by regular nonvisual
audio or written input, this latter type of bond, based on nonvisual
input, is more likely to resemble the indirect relationships our
ancestors had with members of their extended social networks.
This assumption could easily be tested by investigating the
differences and similarities among parasocial bonds between (a)
audience members and visually represented media characters and
(b) audience members and nonvisually represented media charac-
ters. However, because parasocial relationships mimic real-life
relationships and we know the degree of closeness experienced in
interpersonal relationships is influenced by many factors, the study
design must guarantee that all other influencing factors are con-
trolled as far as possible. For example, it would be interesting to
test whether parasocial bonds were stronger for TV newscasters or
for radio newscasters, or whether parasocial bonds between a
reader and a character from a book were weaker than the paraso-
cial bonds between the same character portrayed in a movie and a
consumer of that movie (given that both consumers were equally
interested in this character).
An alternative method for testing this hypothesis would be in a
more controlled experimental setting, where subjects have no
access to visual input. This could be achieved in practice by
investigating the parasocial bonds between media characters and
(a) nonvisually impaired audience members and (b) visually im-
paired audience members. Because the latter group lack the visual
stimuli, their media experience may be an ideal natural experimen-
tal setting for investigating the impact of (a lack of) visual stimuli
on the formation and evolution of bonds between audience mem-
bers and media characters. To be more specific, a new (real or
fictitious) character could be created and presented in an audiovi-
sual movie clip to both visually impaired and nonvisually impaired
audiences, and, controlling for individual differences in attachment
styles, the extent to which the two groups form parasocial rela-
tionships could then be investigated. It may be interesting to
initiate such research when a new TV series is launched, especially
when the actors are not well-known, so that no previous interac-
tions between the characters and the consumers biases the results.
Second, it would also be interesting to test the predictive value
of this new framework against an existing, applied framework,
such as the one of Giles (2000). For instance, the idea that
parasocial bonds between visually represented fictitious characters
and their audiences will be stronger than the parasocial bonds
between nonvisually represented reality characters and their audi-
ences (Assumption 2) would be supported by this framework but
not by Giless framework. This could be tested by comparing the
strength of the parasocial bonds between (a) audience members
and fictional characters in movies, TV shows, virtual worlds, and
so on; and (b) audience members and characters from nonvisual
reality programming, such as radio dramas. Such radio dramas are
still produced in the United Kingdom and would offer great
potential for research.
Finally, as a complement to the main field of star studies, it may
also be interesting to test the framework by using data from social
networking sites or online dating sites. The latter, in particular,
may provide insight into how close people feel to potential part-
ners on the basis of the information they have received about them.
In the control condition, profiles could provide both visual and
written information, whereas in the experimental conditions the
profiles could provide either written or visual information. If the
eye-witnessI-witness framework is correct, then we may expect
people to feel closer to new contacts who provided only visual
information than to new contacts who provided only written in-
formation, because the first group would trigger emotions related
to close, personal social networks whereas the latter would trigger
emotions related to extended social networks.
A range of existing scales can be used to measure parasocial
bonds (see Giles, 2002; McCutcheon, Lange & Houran, 2002),
many of which are based on Rubin et al.s (1985) Parasocial
Interaction Scale. Because this scale was designed to measure the
relation between audiences and TV characters, it has largely been
used to further investigate parasocial interactions with visually
represented characters, such as newscasters (e.g., Rubin et al.,
1985) and soap opera characters (e.g., Rubin & Perse, 1987). An
adapted version of this scale has also been successfully applied to
investigate the relation between audiences and radio characters
(Rubin & Step, 2000). More recently McCutcheon, Lange, and
Houran (2002) developed a similar measurement tool. Their Ce-
lebrity Attitude Scale measures peoples admiration for celebrities,
focusing on three aspects of the nature and motivation of fans
admiration for media characters of all kinds. The intense-personal
dimension, which measures strong, compulsivealmost obses-
sivefeelings about stars, would be especially interesting to use in
this context. The scale has also been used in a range of psycho-
logical studies, showing that correlations exist between the forma-
tion and strength of parasocial interactions and (a) changes in
lifestyle (Boon & Lomore, 2001), (b) autonomy and attachment
changes in adolescence (Giles & Maltby, 2004), (c) self-reports of
mental health (Maltby et al., 2004), and (d) personal body image
(Maltby, Giles, Barber, & McCutcheon, 2005).
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Received February 8, 2012
Revision received February 8, 2012
Accepted February 22, 2012