Self-Disclosure, Attribution, and Social Interaction

An experiment was conducted to investigate relationships among intimacy of self-disclosure, attribution, and socialf interaction. Subjects first observed a -videotaped social encounter in which a stimulus person revealed either highly intimate or less intimate information, and then either made attributions on a free response measure or did not make attributions about the event and stimulus person. During a subsequent interaction between the subject and the stimulus person, unobtrusive measures of subjects' verbal and nonverbal behaviors were recorded. The attribution variation was included in the experimental design in order to investigate the role of attributional activity in mediating the effects of intimacy on behavior. It was predicted and found that the attribution variation interacts with level of intimacy on measures of overt behavior. Subjects who engaged in the task of reporting attributions exhibited more pronounced behavioral differences as a result of the intimacy manipulation than did subjects who worked on a distraction task. The results also indicated that the high intimacy variation led to a greater amount of attributional activity and fewer positive behavioral tendencies during the interaction than did the low intimacy variation. The results are discussed in terms of the function of dispositional attributional activity in facilitating a sense of control in social interaction.

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