Mediated Relationships With TV Characters: The Effects of Perceived and Actual Similarity in Personality Traits

• In Event: Advances in Entertainment Media Research

Abstract

Five TV actors completed the Big Five personality scales for a character they played on a popular Israeli TV comedy. Fifty viewers of each of these series completed the same scales both for themselves and as they thought the characters would have completed them. They then completed parasocial relationship and identification scales with respect to the same character. Perceived and actual similarity scores were computed for each viewer-character pair. These similarity scores were then correlated and used to predict both parasocial relationship strength and the degree of identification. Results show that perceived and actual similarity are mostly unrelated and that perceived similarity, but not actual similarity, is related to parasocial relationships and identification. Implications of these results for mediated relationships theory and measurement validity are discussed.

Authors

• Jonathan Cohen, U of Haifa

• Michal Hershman Shitrit, U of Haifa