Openness to Experience and Neuroticism as Correlates of Parasocial Relationships

One of the driving forces behind my MA thesis topic was a desire to prove that there was nothing wrong with being an ardent fan of something. There are certainly subsets of people that can easily be deemed obsessive, fueling negative stereotypes. But based on my personal experience, I believe that there are more people who enjoy their fandom and fanhood in healthy ways.

When I did some initial reading into the topic of parasocial relationships—one-sided relationships with media personae—the literature was not promising in terms of dispelling the aforementioned negative stereotype of fans. Neuroticism kept appearing as a strong correlate of parasocial relationships. What was surprising to me was that Openness to Experience did not. I wanted to find out if this still held true for a population outside of the western ones that were examined in the literature and using a different measure of personality.

Aside from examining a potential connection between Openness to Experience and parasocial, I also wanted to see if there was a difference between individuals with Openness-correlated parasocial relationships and individuals with Neuroticism-correlated parasocial relationships in their relationships developed, how they experienced them, and the parasocial fantasies that they engaged in. To this end, I decided to utilize both quantitative and qualitative analyses in my thesis.

Study participants were Filipinos who self-identified as a fan; a mix of university students from UP Diliman and members of fan clubs, organizations, or other similar groups outside of the university. Online survey forms were used to gather responses from participants on the Masaklaw na Panukat ng Loob (Mapa ng Loob) and a modified scale intended to measure the intensity of an individual’s parasocial relationship. For the qualitative interviews, participants who indicated that they were open to be interviewed, who were in the top 50% scorers of parasocial relationship intensity, and who had Openness to Experience and Neuroticism scores that ranged from low–low-to-average and average-to-high–high were identified.

The quantitative results show that Openness to Experience as measured by the Mapa ng Loob was significantly positively correlated with the intensity of an individual’s parasocial relationship. The facet of Pagkamaharaya (Imaginativeness), specifically, had the strongest significant correlation with parasocial relationship intensity among all the facets of Openness to Experience and Neuroticism. The fact that this correlation did not appear in the literature could be because previous studies only looked at the connection between parasocial relationships and personality traits up to the domain level, missing out on any potential nuance that a facet-level analysis grants. Alternatively, the absence of the correlation from the literature may be because as a domain, Openness to Experience itself has been much debated, from its name to its conceptualization. In fact, some studies of personality have considered Imaginativeness a trait wholly separate from Openness to Experience.

The qualitative results found that most of the interview participants who identified fictional media personae as their favorites belonged to the high-Neuroticism, low-Openness group. Only taking levels of Openness to Experience into account, only those with high Openness scores identified written media personae (the ones considered most removed from reality because they offer no auditory or visual stimulus to the fan) as their favorite. It was more difficult to draw definitive conclusions from the qualitative interviews compared to the quantitative analyses; the more limited number of participants who indicated that they were open to being interviewed face-to-face meant that some of the participants’ personality scores did not actually fall within the extreme high/low range that was originally targeted (there were, perhaps unsurprisingly, no low-Openness scorers interested in the interviews) and not all of the identified common themes in the interview transcripts provided clear-cut differences between Openness- and Neuroticism-correlated parasocial relationships.

Overall, the study found that regardless of whether an individual’s parasocial relationship intensity is correlated with their levels Openness to Experience or their Neuroticism, their parasocial relationship seems to complement their existing social relationships. These parasocial relationships could, in fact, be utilized as a means of building and developing someone’s connections in the real world. Consider the fan who joins a group dedicated to a particular media persona and makes friends with fellow fans over their shared interest. There are many anecdotal stories of people making lifelong friendships in this way.

These days, it seems like being in a fandom and being active in a fandom is much more normalized. With a growing number of people forming attachments to persona that they have never interacted with, it is important to understand what can be considered an important aspect of their daily lives for many people across diverse groups and backgrounds. This study supports moving away from a stigmatizing view of fanhood where fans are considered maladjusted or socially inept. Most of the time, a fan is just someone who celebrates and appreciates something that gives them joy.