self disclosure

• self disclosure - revealing personal information about yourself
• we start of by revealing basic information and then as you go on and start to like the person more and your relationship is building then you start to reveal more intimate details
• altman and taylor had come up with the social penetration theory
• if they begin to reveal a lot more you may also start to as long as there is a constant method of revealing it should continue well
• if a person is not revealing much about themselves then it will eventually begin to fizz out
• breadth:

  • the quantity of information
  • the outside layer of an onion
• depth:

  • the quality of information
  • allows you to gain a greater insight of a person
  • the inside layers of an onion
• if we reveal to much information way too quickly we may begin to cause the relationship to come to a stop
• this is usually only told to someone you trust/trusted
• reciprocity - when you share a piece of information - taking a layer off an onion we do not know how they will begin to respond
• we hopefully expect that once we rip off a layer they begin to do the same
• AO3 (research support):

  • sprecher and hendrick had studied heterosexual couples and found strong correlations between several measures of satisfaction and self disclosure
  • does not consider causation
  • however does not look at physical attraction and what we enjoy doing together
  • validity may increase as there are supportive findings
  • however can not apply this to non-romantic relationships or the lgbtq+ community
• AO3 (subjectiveness):

  • people may have different levels of self disclosure
  • what levels of perception there may be and what variables may confound this
  • this may reduce the validity of the experiment and the theory
• AO3 (real world application):

  • now that you know about self disclosure you now know roughly how much you should be sharing with others
  • has psychological meaning as anyone can learn about it and then apply this into their own relationships
  • haas and stafford had found that 57% of gay men and women had said that open and honest self-disclosure had maintained and deepened their relationships
• AO3 (cultural differences):

  • individualist cultures - western cultures
  • in an individualist culture we are serving ourselves and we are able to flourish by ourselves
  • collectivist cultures - eastern cultures e.g. china and philippines
  • in a collectivist culture the aim is to benefit the whole community
  • in terms of culture an individualist culture share both breadth and depth whereas collectivist cultures mainly only share breath information
• • nu tang et al (2013) had found that in an individualist culture people are more likely to share sexual thoughts whereas in a collectivist culture they do not as they are told it is wrong