Research Paper Example on Self-Disclosure

Self-disclosure refers to the process involved in an interaction where a person shares personal details about himself or herself with another. It requires that one frees themselves from anxiety and let go of the fear that many people have of losing someone when their relationship becomes intimate (Rosen, Cheever, Cummings, & Felt, 2008). Self-disclosure lays the foundation for building close relationships. The information shared is either descriptive or evaluative and includes a person's feelings, ambitions, achievements, failures, thoughts, fears, and preferences. This process usually occurs in the early stages of relationship development (Joinson & Paine, 2008). The social penetration theory can be used to explain self-disclosure in human relationships.

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Self-disclosure is expected to be reciprocal contrary to which the intimacy formation process crumbles. On the first encounter, people are usually careful what they reveal about themselves. The initial conversations often detail preferences and general information like names, home locations, and job descriptions. Deeper and more personal information is held back until trust has been established (Rosen et al., 2008).

Literature Review

Social Penetration Theory

The social penetration theory was proposed by Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor in 1973 to explain the development of relationships with human beings. The theory proposes that closeness only develops if a relationship evolves gradually from shallow to more personal levels of communication (Rosen et al., 2008). The social penetration theory affirms that relationships form as a result of self-disclosure. The theory assumes that relationships grow in a systematic and predictable manner with self-disclosure being the driving force to push relationships through various layers of intimacy.

The social penetration theory is based on data drawn from experiments, and not from conclusions based on individuals' specific experiences. Self-disclosure has two dimensions, breadth and depth, in developing relationships. Breadth describes the array of subjects that two people discuss while the degree to which details are revealed about a particular topic is the depth of disclosure (Joinson, & Paine, 2008).

The social penetration theory uses the analogy of an onion to imply that self-disclosure occurs as a process of tearing layers away to reveal the deepest aspects of a person. A person's personality can be likened to an onion with the public self on the periphery and the private self at the core. As the person reveals aspects of their life over time, the layers begin to peel off one by one until the innermost layers are revealed. There are three major influences to self-exposure which are the situational context, personal traits, and reward/cost evaluation. There are five stages involved in the process of self-disclosure (Griffin, Crossman, Bordia, Mills, Maras, Pearse & Shanahan, 2010).

Orientation stage: people take part in small talk and use simple, often-said conversational cues that avert a conversation from growing deep like, it happens,' don't sweat it' and so on. People follow culturally set standards of interaction and share general information about themselves.

Exploratory affective stage: the relationship denotes a casual friendship and individuals begin small bits of their personal lives. They start with aspects like attitudes about general topics like public health. People are not always honest about their true opinion for fear of being judged. Most relationships do not advance past this stage.

Affective stage: the relationship has some level of commitment and people talk about personal matters more comfortably. Personal idioms which are word and phrases that have unique meaning understood by the two parties are formed. The relationship may depict criticism and arguments, and the way this is handled determines whether it advance past this stage. The relationship swings between close friendship and intimacy.

Stable stage: the relationship enters a plateau state where most of the deepest ideas, emotions, attitudes and opinions have already been shared and partners can predict each other's reactions. Partners are completely open and act impulsively without worrying about offending the other person.

De-penetration stage: not all relationships get to this point. It is when a relationship begins to crumble down because the disadvantages of being in it exceed the advantages making its termination more beneficial. The process is usually gradual, and it causes the intimacy to die away. During de-penetration, breadth of disclosure reduces as people don't feel the need to talk much anymore while the depth increases because conversations usually involve a lot of negative emotions.

Breadth has the features outlining the outer layers of our lives like one's job, family, favorite food or routine making it very easy to expand as these layers are easily accessible. These subjects are not always revealed at the same time. For instance, on could be open about their work life but hide something about their family life. Depth, on the other hand, includes personal details about a person, for example, painful memories and unusual habits that one may hesitate to share with someone unfamiliar. For a person to feel free to expose their depth they have to be freed from anxiety; they need to feel that they are not being judged by the other person (Rosen et al., 2008).

Both breadth and depth can exist independent of each other (Griffin et al., 2010). Some people have a relationship that focuses on intimate details about one issue. Other relationships are casual and only involve simple conversations about everything. The two conditions that are required to allow the expansion of depth and they include a willingness by both parties to open up, a collection of social communication skills. This process is called reciprocity (Rosen et al., 2008). If one person shares information about their personal life but gets no feedback from the other party, the relationship breaks down. If one party hesitates to open up, the other has to keep addressing different points of conversation to ease the tension.

Discussion

Barriers to Self-Disclosure

There are a number of factors which influence levels of self-disclosure among people. They include age, race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and religion. Some cultures value privacy more than others (Hammer & Gudykunst, 1997). One may also be worried about brewing a conflict if they voice their opinions to someone who holds different views by way of belonging to different culture be it socially, biologically or religiously. People feel at ease sharing information about themselves with people with whom they have something in common (Griffin et al., 2010). It is not that individuals with immense cultural differences are incapable of self-disclosure, the process is just slower.

There are exceptions of self-disclosure where in certain situations; people tend to reveal personal information about themselves to total strangers. In such occurrences, disclosure is regarded as being impulsive, and its purpose is to allow people to express deep thoughts and emotions without the danger of feeling judged. People tend to dismiss otherwise intimate information when it comes from a stranger with whom they have no emotional ties especially when they find that it is unlikely they will meet that person again ( Griffin et al., 2010). They have nothing to lose.

Self-Disclosure and Online Dating

Self-disclosure in the 21st century has a new platform. Unlike past relationships that were formed through physical interactions and tended to last long today, it is possible to have an intimate relationship without ever having interacted physically through online dating (Park, Jin, & Jin, 2011). It is human nature to need affiliation and intimacy as outlined in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Throughout history, people have always made great effort to establish an intimate relationship, and online dating is a trend in the 21st century (Hancock, Toma, & Ellison, 2008). People are meeting online and forming relationships that sometimes end up being intimate. People create profiles in which information usually revealed in self-disclosure is displayed on the website. Such information includes a name, a picture, interests, a statement of what one is looking for in a partner and contact information (Tang, & Wang, 2012).

What makes online dating attractive? There are four reasons which are that people don't have to leave their home or work to date, there is a degree of anonymity, dating sites are available 24/7, and it is safe from social influence in terms being judged (Rege, 2009). Self-disclosure tends to be faster in online relationships. A study by Rosson (1999) revealed that people are comfortable sharing personal details about their lives over mediums like emails and online chartrooms (Rosen et al., 2008). However, online dating is characterized by a lot of deception. People tend to edit and reorganize details about themselves to create an image they think will look attractive to other people. This process is called self-presentation. Deception in self-presentation varies from exaggerations to outright lies (Hancock & Toma, 2007). Most people use deception in an attempt to attract their favorable partners by uploading fake photographs, pretending to be interested in hobbies they are not or lying about their names and occupations.

The concept of cybercrime is still new territory. It covers all criminal activities carries out using computers including fraud, impersonation, child pornography, espionage and copyright infringement. A lot of people get robbed by potential partners who they met online and got intimate with (Rodolfo, 2012). Some cyber criminals get close to victims, learn their weaknesses and manipulate them into giving them money or other valuable items.

Laws have been made to address cyber-crime, but they do not help much. Laws protect service providers from being liable for any offenses committed through their websites even when they have deliberately left their site vulnerable to cybercrime (Park, Jin & Jin, 2011). Research needs to be carried out to determine loopholes that cyber criminals use in their malicious acts and recommendations made to improve cyber security. A way to verify people's real identities should be established so that it will be easy to follow up and catch cyber criminals.

References

Griffin, E. A., Crossman, J., Bordia, S., Mills, C., Maras, S., Pearse, G., & Shanahan, D. (2010). A First Look at Communication Theory, Em Griffin. Details: Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009. 230-265.

Hammer, M. R., & Gudykunst, W. B. (1987). The influence of ethnicity and sex on social penetration in close friendships. Journal of Black Studies, 17(4), 418-437.

Hancock, J. T., & Toma, C. L. (2009). Putting your best face forward: The accuracy of online dating photographs. Journal of Communication, 59(2), 367-386.

Hancock, J. T., Toma, C., & Ellison, N. (2007, April). The truth about lying in online dating profiles. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 449-452). ACM.

Joinson, A. N., & Paine, C. B. (2008). Self-disclosure, privacy and the Internet. The Oxford handbook of Internet psychology, 237-252.

Park, N., Jin, B., & Jin, S. A. A. (2011). Effects of self-disclosure on relational intimacy in Facebook. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(5), 1974-1983.

Ramirez, Rodolfo. "Online impersonation: a new forum for crime on the Internet." Crim. Just. 27 (2012): 6.

Rege, A. (2009). What's love got to do with it? Exploring online dating scams and identity fraud. International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 3(2), 494.

Rosen, L. D., Cheever, N. A...