OSU Authors: New book from Ecampus researcher explores the psychology of imaginary friends

By Molly Rosbach on Jan. 30, 2025
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Cover art of the book is an illustration of a girl holding hands with a shadow.

If you’ve ever had an imaginary friend or engaged in personal banter with an AI chatbot, Oregon State University researcher and author Naomi Aguiar is here to reassure you: You are not weird.

Her book, “Imaginary Friends and the People Who Create Them,” was co-written with University of Oregon professor emerita Marjorie Taylor and recently published by Oxford University Press.

“This book is really about the imaginary relationships we create for ourselves, as children and as adults,” said Aguiar, associate director of the Ecampus Research Unit. “For a long time, there’s been this idea that imaginary friends are a new, modern thing, and that adults who have them are weird. But historically, for as long as there’s been storytelling, there have been stories about imaginary friends.” 

While earning her doctorate in developmental psychology, Aguiar started exploring how imaginary friends might help children cope with adverse experiences. Her work later grew to encompass parasocial relationships with media characters and with artificially intelligent systems, where someone feels they are in a relationship with a celebrity or media character despite having no direct personal interaction with them. 

One set of studies highlighted in the book found that when children in refugee camps were given a stuffed animal to take care of, along with an invented backstory for the toy, those children were able to cope with the stress of being a refugee better than those who did not receive a stuffed animal. 

“It’s a really low-stakes intervention where, through the power of their imagination and through activation of their internal resources, these kids are able to cope better,” Aguiar said. “It’s a way of taking what’s happening internally and projecting it onto an object, so you’re taking all those fears and then working them out through your imagination.” 

Imaginary friends can benefit children in non-traumatic situations, too. The book discusses the ways kids with imaginary friends differ from kids without, which include being more creative storytellers and more interested in social interaction than peers without imaginary friends.  

On the adult side of the spectrum, the book touches on the imaginary companions of famous people like author Agatha Christie and dancer Paul Taylor. Aguiar and Marjorie Taylor include a series of interviews with famous fiction writers sharing about how their characters may act as imaginary friends in their lives, even arguing with their creators about plotlines. 

Aguiar has also researched the relationships adults have with AI chatbots, whose use is becoming more widespread thanks to systems like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. 

These relationships go beyond the question of “Is it real or not real?”, she said. More fitting questions to ask might be, “How does this relationship affect your life, whether positively or negatively? How has it shaped your interaction with other people in the world? “

Aguiar said any units at OSU developing chatbots for student use can reach out to her as a resource to understand what people are looking for when they interact with a social AI system. 

Where imaginary friends draw solely from their inventor’s own thoughts and experiences, AI chatbots are pulling content from vast troves of online data and are responding to users in ways that are designed to keep them on the app, she said. 

“Even though it may feel like you’re getting your needs met, in some cases, you could be in an abusive relationship with a chatbot, due to design features that might make the chatbot manipulative and controlling,” she said. “For developers, you really want to think about, What are the goals of this chatbot? How do we want this to serve people? How are we going to mitigate the harms?” 

“Imaginary Friends and the People Who Create Them” is available as an e-book and paperback through Oxford University Press and Amazon.