Why Celebrity Gossip Hooks Us: The Psychology of Parasocial Bonds

Scrolling through headlines about a celebrity breakup or feud is not just idle entertainment. Psychologists who study media behavior say it draws on two separate but related mechanisms: an evolved human drive to track information about other people, and a documented tendency to form genuine, if one-sided, emotional bonds with public figures we have never met, known as parasocial relationships.

What counts as a 'parasocial' relationship

WebMD and the resource site Find a Psychologist both describe parasocial relationships (PSRs) as one-sided connections people form with celebrities, influencers or media personalities they do not know personally. Find a Psychologist describes them as relationships in which 'one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other's existence.'

WebMD distinguishes three intensities: entertainment-social PSR, the casual fandom most people experience; intense-personal PSR, closer to celebrity worship; and borderline-pathological PSR, which can involve uncontrollable fantasies. The large majority of fans fall into the first, low-intensity category.

An old habit: why information about other people feels rewarding

Separately from celebrity attachment, humans have a broader appetite for gossip — talk about absent third parties — that researchers trace to evolutionary pressures. TIME magazine's reporting on gossip science describes evolutionary psychologist Frank McAndrew, of Knox College, as arguing that in the small ancestral groups humans once lived in, knowing who could be trusted, who was involved with whom, and who had powerful allies was not idle curiosity but a matter of survival.

The same TIME report cites UC Riverside researcher Megan Robbins, whose 2019 tracking of real conversations found that most gossip is neither flattering nor malicious but neutral — simply news about people who are not present. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has separately theorized that human language itself partly evolved to let groups exchange this kind of social information at a scale physical grooming in primates could not match.

Not every finding supports a simple 'gossip equals bonding' story. A 2023 study by Konrad Rudnicki and colleagues at the University of Antwerp, published in Scientific Reports, put 66 university students through a stress test and then had them either gossip about controversial scenarios or do an unrelated creative task. The researchers found no evidence that gossip reduced stress hormones the way social grooming does in other primates; instead, gossip raised markers of emotional and physiological arousal in both directions, which the authors interpreted as a sign gossip is emotionally engaging and promotes sociability rather than simply lowering stress.

Why social media intensified celebrity attachment

Find a Psychologist notes that parasocial relationships predate the internet — they were first studied around television and radio personalities — but have expanded to bloggers, gamers and social media personalities as platforms became more interactive. Fans can now comment on, and sometimes receive replies from, the people they follow, which the site says increases the perceived intimacy of the bond even though it remains fundamentally one-sided.

WebMD reports that parasocial attachments became more common during COVID-19 lockdowns, when in-person contact was limited, and notes that some groups at higher risk of depression, including sexual minorities and older adults with weaker family relationships, may lean more heavily on these media bonds.

When the attachment helps, and when it doesn't

Both sourced articles describe real upsides alongside real risks, which largely depend on intensity and on whether the parasocial bond substitutes for, or supplements, in-person relationships.

Find a Psychologist adds that at least one cited study found no correlation between loneliness and how strongly viewers form parasocial relationships with on-screen characters, which it says challenges older assumptions that only lonely or socially isolated people form these bonds.

The bottom line

Across the sources, the consensus is that following celebrity news and feeling attached to a famous person is a normal extension of evolved social instincts and common media behavior, not inherently a sign of dysfunction. The risk profile changes mainly with intensity: casual fandom carries little downside, while relationships that replace real-world contact, or that unravel suddenly when a celebrity disappears from view, are the cases researchers flag as worth attention.