Parasocial relationships | In a lonely world, ‘parasocial’ is Cambridge’s ‘Word of the Year’: What this means

Cambridge captured this cultural second, updating the definition of ‘parasocial’ in September 2025 to incorporate the “possibility of a relationship with AI”.

What does ‘parasocial’ imply?

Sociologists Donald Horton and R Richard Wohl coined the phrase of their 1956 paper titled ‘Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction’. The phrase combines the time period ‘social’ with the Greek-derived prefix ‘para’, which means “closely resembling” or “almost”.

Horton and Wohl used the time period to explain the relationship viewers kind with media personalities they view on tv. They known as it a “seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer”.

The interplay, characterised as “one-sided”, is illusory, the place the “fan comes to believe that he ‘knows’ the persona more intimately and profoundly than others do”.

It’s why some hunt for easter eggs in Taylor Swift’s discography, satisfied that they provide glimpses into her real-life experiences. Or why many partake in celeb face-offs. Or in excessive circumstances, flip into their stalkers. Some even have parasocial relationships with fictional characters.

Researchers have additionally traced membership to excessive ideologies and political alignments to parasocial relationships, which fulfil the want for belonging.

Parasocial interactions in the digital, AI age

The web has dramatically amplified parasocial relationships. The celebrities, or ‘performers’ so to talk, are nearer than ever, fairly actually in the palm of our arms, accessible throughout a plethora of gadgets. Their performances can be found at any time of the day.

With social media, followers imagine they’ve higher entry and intimate data of the celeb. The time period parasocial now encompasses on-line celebrities, equivalent to YouTubers, influencers, or commentators. Case in level: Cambridge famous a spike in search curiosity for the time period ‘parasocial’ in June 2025 after YouTube streamer IShowSpeed blocked a fan who described themselves as his “number 1 parasocial” in an elaborate X thread about his break-up.

Even extra so, podcasts are more and more designed with an intimate format, giving the phantasm of associates chatting. Online discourse on Reddit or X dissect the non-public lives of celebrities, the place customers can fawn or hate over them, and boast of intimate particulars (an undisclosed fan interplay or data from somebody who has labored with them).

Then there are the AI chatbots. Most social media platforms now provide AI companions to customers. On Instagram, you’ll be able to slide into the DMs to have conversations with an AI. Grok’s AI companion, known as Ani, based mostly on Japanese anime, has been known as a “girlfriend simulator”. Chatbot companies like Replika and Character.ai provide totally different personas for companionship to tens of millions of customers.

Besides these character-based companions, persons are changing into more and more depending on chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Microsoft’s Claude for ‘how-to’ recommendation, decision-making, and even confiding.

A warning…

Humans are inherently social creatures, pushed by a deep want for connection and belonging. In that gentle, parasocial relationships aren’t inherently unhealthy. Research reveals that when kids establish with on-screen characters—equivalent to Dora the Explorer—they typically study extra successfully. These bonds may help adolescents as they form their identities.

Parasocial ties may even nurture actual communities, bringing collectively individuals with shared pursuits who might kind real friendships.

The bother begins when these one-sided relationships function a substitute for precise human contact. When they do, they’ll encourage isolation and exacerbate mental-health challenges—a downside intensified by the rise of AI chatbots.

Experts warn that we nonetheless don’t totally perceive how sustained interplay with AI companions impacts emotional well-being. A pair of latest research by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI provide some clues. They discovered that “heavy users” of ChatGPT have been extra prone to think about it a “friend” or “attribute human-like emotions to it”. These heavy customers, indulging in “personal” conversations with the chatbots, additionally reported the highest ranges of “loneliness”, which have been magnified if the person set the chatbot’s voice mode to the reverse gender. The research, nevertheless, level to their very own limitations in understanding whether or not heavy utilization leads to loneliness or if lonely people are extra vulnerable to heavy use and growing emotional bonds. They conclude that, along with technological guardrails to make sure that AI doesn’t exchange human connections, there’s additionally a want for “societal interventions” that foster human relationships.

The want for these interventions is extra pressing than ever. Around 10 per cent of the world’s inhabitants makes use of ChatGPT alone, in keeping with OpenAI, and 70 per cent of their conversations are “non-work-related”. Tech platforms are racing to make chatbots increasingly more human. Billionaires are betting on the metaverse, a digital area the place human beings can work together with one another as digital avatars, as the web’s future.

So in selecting parasocial as its ‘Word of the Year’, Cambridge not solely captures the cultural zeitgeist however reminds us of the have to protect human connection.