Self-disclosure and attraction: Effects of intimacy and desirability on beliefs and attitudes.

Abstract Desirability and intimacy of information disclosed by another person were manipulated orthogonally in two experiments, one involving a fictitious female student and the other a female confederate. Attraction was found to increase with the desirability of the disclosed information, but the magnitude of this effect was contingent on the information's intimacy and on the elicitation of beliefs about the other person. When beliefs were elicited prior to the measurement of attraction, intimate information had a stronger effect on beliefs and attitudes than had superficial information. However, when beliefs were elicited after the evaluative judgments had been made, intimate information attenuated the effects of positive and negative self-disclosures. These findings are discussed in the framework of a “perceived attributes model” which stipulates that attraction is a function of beliefs about the other person. Consistent with this model, an estimate of attraction based on the beliefs elicited was found to be highly correlated with standard attraction measures. Unlike earlier studies, no evidence was found for self-disclosure reciprocity.

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