Quickie: Are You in Love With a Show?
What the connection to your favorite TV shows may really mean
We’ve all been there: You love a show — or another piece of media that you consume regularly — and you feel a strong connection to the people you’re bringing into your home, and your heart, on a regular basis. We absolutely fall in love with them, and we want to catch up with them every week to find out what’s going on in their fictional lives. Our love of these programs may be dismissed as a guilty pleasure, but it actually serves an important purpose: According to research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, it helps us feel like we belong and can act as a surrogate for social interaction.
“The research provides evidence for the ‘social surrogacy hypothesis,’ which holds that humans can use technologies, like television, to provide the experience of belonging when no real belongingness has been experienced,” said researcher Shira Gabriel. “We also argue that other commonplace technologies such as movies, music or interactive video games, as well as television, can fulfill this need.”
Gabriel and her colleagues, Jaye L. Derrick and Kurt Hugenberg, studied the extent to which our favorite media can alleviate feelings of loneliness and fulfill our social needs. After a series of experiments, they found…
