The Differential Effects of Direct Address on Parasocial Experience and Identification: Empirical Evidence for Conceptual Difference

Abstract

Whereas parasocial experience is conceptualized as imagined interaction identification is defined as the merging of one’s identity with a character’s. Thus, having a character face the camera and directly address viewers should increase the sense of parasocial experience but not affect the intensity of identification. An experiment compared the levels of parasocial experience and identification among viewers of clips from the show House of Cards that included or omitted direct address tested this prediction. Results provide support for the previously theorized conceptualdistinction between parasocial experience and identification.

Keywords:

• Direct Address
• Identification
• Parasocial

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The original study was intended to explore the process that allows viewers to like villains and the extent that direct address made viewers like the character but also potentially feel complicit. The dependent variable was liking, and the explanatory variables included, besides identification and PSE, prior viewing, the notion of complicity, and perceived morality.

2. Just as one can use a paired t-test to examine if there are differences between measures (assuming the measures are on the same metric), one can also treat the two measures as a within-subjects factor in a mixed analysis of variance that includes a between-subjects factor. The interaction term in such an analysis would reveal if the between-subjects factor has a different effect on one measure than the other. We considered such an approach as appropriate because simply demonstrating that the effect of our experimental manipulation is significant for one outcome but not the other is not sufficient for demonstrating that the effects of the manipulation on outcomes are significantly different.