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. 2022 Oct 4;12(1):16565.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-17487-3.

Parasocial relationships on YouTube reduce prejudice towards mental health issues

Shaaba Lotun  1   2 , Veronica M Lamarche  1 , Spyridon Samothrakis  3 , Gillian M Sandstrom  1 , Ana Matran-Fernandez  4
Affiliations

Parasocial relationships on YouTube reduce prejudice towards mental health issues

Shaaba Lotun et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Intergroup contact has long been established as a way to reduce prejudice among society, but in-person interventions can be resource intensive and limited in reach. Parasocial relationships (PSRs) might navigate these problems by reaching large audiences with minimal resources and have been shown to help reduce prejudice in an extended version of contact theory. However, previous studies have shown inconsistent success. We assessed whether parasocial interventions reduce prejudice towards people with mental health issues by first creating a new PSR with a YouTube creator disclosing their experiences with borderline personality disorder. Our intervention successfully reduced explicit prejudice and intergroup anxiety. We corroborated these effects through causal analyses, where lower prejudice levels were mediated by the strength of parasocial bond. Preliminary findings suggest that this lower prejudice is sustained over time. Our results support the parasocial contact hypothesis and provide an organic method to passively reduce prejudice on a large scale.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Diagram of participant flow.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Experimental protocol. The items for which Creator A is featured are filled in gray, the ones that refer to Creator B are in blue, and the transparent blocks are common across the three conditions.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Implicit prejudice d scores (as measured by the IAT) pre- and post-intervention for each condition. Positive (resp. negative) values of d represent less (resp. more) prejudice towards people with mental health issues (w.r.t. physical health issues).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Explicit prejudice scores per condition, for each of the explicit measures, after the intervention vs. at the 1-week follow-up survey. The lines inside the plots represent the underlying data points for each of the distributions.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Causal graph for explicit prejudice measures.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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