[chordalkeyboard]

The ape brain doesn't have a separate category for 'people you see on TV' and 'people you work with', celebrities are stored in the same place as your friends except the nature of parasocial relations seems to polarize their status; such that these people are seen as very high or very low status.

[rcme]

Citation needed

[chordalkeyboard]

>> Our brains treat on-screen faces the same as in-person faces, explains Bradley Bond. He is a communication researcher at the University of San Diego in California. “We assign personhood to people we see in-person and on screens,” he explains. And we “process them in a similar fashion.” We are a social species. So we crave connections to other people. “It’s human instinct,” he says, and parasocial bonds help fill that need.

https://www.snexplores.org/article/imagine-friends-parasocia...

[p0pcult]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

Will wikipedia work?