Collins & Miller (1994)

What is Social Penetration Theory?

• Proposed by Altman & Taylor (1973)

• Argues that close relationships are formed by a gradual process of self-disclosure → sharing personal things about yourself with someone you trust

• self disclosure leads to self-validation

• Disclosure is part of the cost-benefit analysis that takes place in any relationship

What are the 4 Stages of disclosure?

Orientation

• Aka “small talk”

• Involves sharing simple information about oneself without revealing any vulnerable informatio

Exploratory

• Expressing feelings and opinions on rather “safe” topics

Affective

• Beginning to share information of a private/personal nature

• Also involves intimate physical relations

Stable

• One feels that they can be honest and open with a partner 

• Trust is strongly developed

• The other person's emotional reactions can be predicted

Aim?

To determine if self-disclosure can be related to attraction

Procedure

• Conducted a meta-analysis of self-disclosure studies

what is a meta analysis?

• a statistical method that combines quantitative results from multiple independent studies on the same topic to find an overall “big picture”

Limitations

• over-generalizing

• difficulty establishing causality

Findings

• People who disclose intimate information about themselves are more liked than people who don’t

• People tend to disclose more personal information to those they like

• People tend to like people more when they disclose information to them

  • This indicates that disclosure could be important in establishing and maintaining a relationship

Criticisms

• difficult to determine a cause-and-effect relationship between disclosure and the health of a relationship

• appears more likely that disclosure results from a healthy relationship rather than a cause of one

• Sample bias → moslty conducted on Western women

• Men and women appear to have different disclosure patterns, so the theory may be overly simplistic

• reductionist