Why Do We Fall for an Oshi? The Psychology of Wanting More, Feeling Close and Widening Your World

You meant to watch just one clip in the middle of the night, and now you’re on the third. You know there are no notifications, and you open the app anyway to check for updates. If you’ve ever fallen for an oshi (the person or character you support most, roughly what K-pop fans call a “bias”), you know this pull that’s hard to explain even to yourself.

Psychology and neuroscience have built up explanations for that pull. It isn’t weak willpower, and it isn’t escapism.

The Short Answer: Three Workings of the Mind Overlap

The reasons people fall for an oshi are easiest to understand through three workings of the mind.

1. “I want to see it again” piles up (reward learning)
2. You feel close even though you’ve never met (one-sided intimacy)
3. Your world expands through your oshi (self-expansion)

You find a new video and it makes you happy. As you hear their voice and their way of thinking again and again, you start to feel close to them. And through your oshi you discover new music and new places. When these overlap, “like” doesn’t stop at a single moment; it grows into a wish to know more. Which of the three is strongest differs from person to person, and all three are not always present. Let’s take them one at a time.

Falling for an oshiNot weak willpower, not escapism

• Reward learning"I want to see it again" piles up
• One-sided intimacyClose without ever meeting
• Self-expansionYour world grows through your oshi

Which one is strongest differs from person to person.

People with an oshi are not rare. In a July 2025 survey of 10,000 men and women aged 15 to 69 by the market research firm Yano Research Institute, 64.2% of those who identify as otaku said they have an “oshi,” and average annual spending per person across 31 categories was ¥50,472 (Yano Research Institute, consumer survey on “otaku”, in Japanese). The Ministry of Finance’s public relations magazine Finance also took up oshi-katsu as an economic trend in its November 2025 issue, so it is now a behavior big enough for government documents to cover (Ministry of Finance, Finance, November 2025, in Japanese).

64.2%

Of self-identified otaku have an oshi

¥50,472

Average yearly spending per person across 31 categories

10,000

Men and women aged 15 to 69 surveyed

Falling for an oshi is a common experience, not a fringe one.

Source: Yano Research Institute, July 2025 survey (in Japanese)

Tracing the Origins of the Research

The word oshi-katsu is new, but the theories that explain what happens in the mind have been built up over a surprisingly long time.

The 1956 paper was subtitled “intimacy at a distance.” The term was coined to explain why, as radio and television spread, some people came to feel friend-like emotions toward performers they had never met (archive of the Horton & Wohl (1956) original paper). A parasocial relationship is one in which you feel one-way closeness or attachment toward a person in the media, and the definition builds in an asymmetry: the other side does not know you individually. Long before social media, the skeleton of today’s oshi-katsu had already been described.

1. 1956Parasocial interactionOne-sided intimacy through media
2. 1980s onwardSelf-expansion theoryThe self grows through close bonds
3. 2002Celebrity Attitude ScaleStages of attachment to celebrities
4. 2015ProjectionJapanese cognitive science framework

The mind's workings were mapped long before the word oshi-katsu.

The Celebrity Attitude Scale, developed in 2002 by the psychologist McCutcheon and colleagues, was new in treating interest in celebrities as a set of stages. Its intensity rises from enjoying a celebrity as entertainment, to strong personal attachment, to a stage where fantasy digs into daily life, and it has since been used in more than 100 studies (McCutcheon, Lange & Houran (2002), British Journal of Psychology). The idea is that falling isn’t a yes-or-no question; it comes in degrees.

Layer 1: “I Want to See It Again” Piles Up (Reward Learning)

The first thing to kick in is a mechanism that remembers an experience that made you happy and makes you want to see it once more. Psychology calls this reward learning.

The brain learns from the gap between what it expected and what actually happened. When an unexpected new song or surprise announcement arrives, you get a gap of “this is better than I thought,” and you want to check again next time. Technically, this gap between prediction and outcome is called a reward prediction error (Brain Science Dictionary, “reward prediction”, in Japanese). Dopamine is not simply a “pleasure chemical”; it is also involved in this learning and in the urge to “check again next time.”

An oshi’s output fits this mechanism far too well. Updates come at irregular times, and the content is unpredictable. After a run of days with nothing, a surprise announcement suddenly arrives. Learning theory has long shown that a reward that comes at unpredictable times (a variable reward) is harder to extinguish than one that comes at fixed intervals. So the very possibility that “there might be no update” keeps the habit of checking firmly in place.

1. 01CheckOpen the app just in case
2. 02Nothing yetAn empty day is part of the pattern
3. 03SurpriseA sudden announcement lands
4. 04Want moreThe gap makes you check again

↻ and back to the start

Turning off notifications cuts the number of unpredictable signals.

That’s why turning off notifications makes sense. Rather than gritting your teeth, you reduce the number of unpredictable signals that reach you. The feeling of being unable to keep up during a heavy stretch of kyokyu (the supply of new content and merchandise from official sources) and the feeling of being pulled into mechanisms where the result is decided on the spot, like gacha and supacha (paid chat messages on live streams), are rooted in the same place.

How Is This Different From the Buzzword “Dopagaki”?

On social media, people sometimes call themselves dopagaki when they catch themselves chasing one short video or notification after another. It’s internet slang, short for “dopamine-addicted brat.” It also appeared in a June 2026 buzzword survey by Joshi Kosei Lab, a research group focused on Japanese high school girls (announcement from the survey source, in Japanese).

It is not a diagnosis, and it doesn’t explain everything people feel for their oshi. Along with “I want to see the next video,” there is also closeness to that person and the joy of your world widening. For the word’s origin and usage, see our glossary entry on dopagaki.

Layer 2: You Feel Close Even Though You’ve Never Met (One-Sided Intimacy)

Next, the person on the other side of the screen gradually starts to feel close. Once you’ve heard their voice, learned how they think and even memorized their habits, closeness forms even though you’ve never actually met. Psychology calls this one-sided intimacy (a parasocial relationship). The other person may not know you individually, but you have returned to them many times, so you can feel a friend-like nearness.

Live-stream comment sections and social media replies push this feeling further. Having your name read out, getting a like, or feeling recognized by your oshi adds a two-way texture to a relationship that was supposed to run one way. But how far that texture reaches is always decided by the sender. Remembering this asymmetry is the foundation for keeping a healthy distance from your oshi.

Yuki Ninomiya, a clinical psychologist and certified public psychologist, defines an oshi as “someone from whom you gain something by supporting them,” and says that oshi-katsu works as “an act of finding meaning in life” through gaining a role model and self-disclosure. He also describes cases where a child who can’t go to school gradually opens up, at first only when talking about their oshi (Soredoko, interview with clinical psychologist Yuki Ninomiya, in Japanese). A relationship with someone you can’t meet can sometimes be a doorway into real human relationships.

Layer 3: Your World Expands Through Your Oshi (Self-Expansion)

The third working is one in which your interests and abilities grow, with your oshi as the entrance. Psychology calls this self-expansion. It sounds difficult, but the idea is simple: you receive new ways of thinking and new experiences from someone important to you, and your world becomes wider than before. The American psychologists Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron proposed it in their research on romantic love, and in 2025 a review tracing it from its origins to recent research was published (Emery (2025), Social and Personality Psychology Compass).

You’ll probably recognize this from your own oshi-katsu. You read the author your oshi likes, visit your oshi’s hometown, take up the sport your oshi took on. You learn a language you didn’t know and come to know the geography of a city you’d never been to. It seems like you’re doing these things for your oshi, but what ends up expanding is your own world. An oshi is a person you love, and also an entrance to worlds you didn’t know. Much of oshi-katsu’s charm lies in the fact that it doesn’t end with buying and watching, but leaves you with new experiences.

What the Word “Numa” (Swamp) Captures

In Japanese cognitive science, research explaining oshi-katsu through a framework called “projection,” proposed in 2015, is advancing. Projection is the mind’s work of projecting representations you have given meaning to onto objects in the world, overlaying the physical world and the psychological world. From this angle, oshi-katsu is organized as an active behavior made up of five elements: supporting, generating, nurturing, deriving and expanding (Kodansha C Station, “The true nature of ‘oshi-katsu’ through the lens of cognitive science”, in Japanese).

In other words, you see your oshi and feel something, act on that feeling through posts, creative work or trips, and those acts produce new feelings in turn. Fans have long called the state where this cycle keeps turning numa, a swamp you sink into; in English fandom you might say “rabbit hole.” An academic explanation and a word that arose naturally in the field are pointing at the same thing.

The psychiatrist Toru Kumashiro approaches this from the framework of behavioral addiction. He analyzes that strong absorption tends to occur “when something you happened to meet brings more joy than you expected” in the midst of anxiety or disappointment (Gendai Business, analysis by Toru Kumashiro, in Japanese). Look back on when you fell, and many of you will find it overlapped with a change in school, a job change or a shift in relationships. That is not proof of weakness. It is a record that you got what you needed at the time.

Observe How You Fall

The best use of knowing the mechanism is not to blame yourself, but to be able to choose how to handle it. Once a month, look over the items below. When the number that don’t apply grows, it’s time to adjust.

• The time I spend waiting for news isn’t cutting into my sleep or work
• I can create days without notifications on my own judgment
• What I started because of my oshi is useful outside of my oshi, too
• I set a spending limit first and choose within that range
• I don’t think a day when my feelings fade is a sign I’ve failed
• Outside oshi-katsu, I have at least one other pleasure or relationship

Fewer checks don’t necessarily mean there’s a problem. But when distress continues, your life is being harmed, it’s hard to stop on your own, and all of this lasts a long time, you may have gone beyond oshi-katsu fatigue. Please turn to psychiatry or psychosomatic medicine, a certified public psychologist, or a municipal counseling service (all of these are Japanese services). This article is a general explanation, not diagnosis or advice on treatment.

Research Trends From the Past Year

From 2025 to 2026, the range of subjects studied in this field has widened noticeably. In March 2025, a mixed-methods paper examined the link between the strength of parasocial relationships and psychological well-being among 124 young people living in India (average age 20.6). The result: the “strength” of the relationship itself showed no significant link to well-being (International Journal of Adolescence and Youth (2025)). It can be read as showing that what you gain through the relationship matters more than how deeply you’ve fallen.

Also in 2025, a study in the journal Media Psychology used experience sampling to follow how parasocial relationships form and break down with both real people and virtual influencers. It is increasingly confirmed that the same kind of relationship can form even when the other side is not a real person, which lines up directly with the growing number of people who make VTubers (streamers who perform as animated avatars) and AI characters their oshi.

Notes From The Oshi Lab: Designing a Pull Comes With Responsibility

Of the three layers, the one companies can manipulate most easily is the first. Shift the timing of updates, hide the contents until the item is opened, rush people with time limits. Raise the unpredictability and the number of checks and purchases goes up. But that only exploits the reward system to increase how much people do. It doesn’t nurture the feeling of liking. Short-term numbers may rise, but such designs tend to hasten a cooling-off period or people leaving.

Look at the fandoms that last, and it’s the third layer that is doing the work. Someone started reading because of their oshi, started running, came to love that town. An experience of self-expansion stays inside the person even if their oshi’s activities stop. That is why they can come back. What an official side should offer is not only paths that pile on exclusivity and immediacy but also room for fans to widen their own worlds: archives, content you can learn from, and programs you can join alone. That is what we at The Oshi Lab believe.

And one more thing. The parasocial relationship of the second layer is something the performer’s side can deliberately strengthen: saying names, making eye contact, appearing to speak to each fan individually. Since that works as a job, the side that strengthens it carries a responsibility to help fans keep a boundary with reality. A position that can design a pull is also a position that can take steps so people aren’t swallowed by that pull.

Related articles: How Close Is Too Close to Your Oshi? Healthy Distance / What Is Doutan Kyohi? Why Some Fans Can’t Stand Others Who Love the Same Oshi / What Is Oshi-Katsu Fatigue? 5 Moments Your Oshi Becomes an Obligation / What Is Numa? The Meaning of Falling Into the Swamp