The Role of Parasocial Relationships in Digital Learning: An Exploratory Case Study

Social media has become integral to education and learning because it provides a platform for access to information and resources beyond traditional classroom settings, enabling students to expand their knowledge and skills in a more interactive and personalized manner. The relationships that are formed with on-screen characters or personas (parasocial relationships) can improve understanding of the material and engagement with media content. The current study aimed to investigate the impact of parasocial relationships on a child's learning ability and test performance. The experiment, conducted as an exploratory case study with a typically developing 10-year-old child, included a parasocial condition with prior exposure to personal TikTok content of some educational video creators and other creators presented as novel (control); control conditions were further split into visible and non-visible video presenters. Performance was assessed using tests specialized by the subject and knowledge category, and an interview on the parasocial relationship was administered. The findings demonstrate that performance correlated with the presenter ratings obtained through the interview and not with the amount of previous exposure to the content created by the presenter.