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Intimacy and Scarcity of Self-Disclosure

Effects on Interpersonal Attraction for Males and Females

University of Missouri-Columbia

Herbert L. Mirels

Ohio State University

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that the relationship between the intimacy of self-disclosure and liking for the self-disclosing person is mediated in part by the perceived scarcity of the revelations. Within a factorial design, subjects expecting to hear a same-sex partner disclose information which was low, medium, or high in intimacy, were either given no information about the scarcity of the disclosures or were led to believe that the partner would ordinarily reveal such information to a great many people or to very few people. Although both males and females gave clear evidence of disclosure reciprocity, males' liking for their partners failed to be influenced by either the intimacy or scarcity of the expected revelations. For females, when no scarcity information was provided, increased information intimacy produced greater liking. As anticipated, when scarcity was held constant at either a high or low level, the effects of intimacy on attraction were attenuated and nonsignificant. The findings are discussed in terms of a revised commodity theory formulation.

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