Mediated relationships with TV characters: The Effects of Perceived and Actual Similarity in Personality Traits

Five TV actors completed the Big Five personality scale for a character they played on a popular Israeli TV comedy. 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 measured similarity scores (i.e., using the actors’ scores) were computed for each viewer-character pair. These similarity scores were then used to predict both parasocial relationship strength and the degree of identification. Results show that perceived and measured similarity are mostly unrelated and that perceived similarity, but not measured similarity, is related to parasocial relationships and identification. Implications of these results for mediated relationships theory and measurement validity are discussed.