Social penetration theory

Photo by: Miriam Espacio

Social penetration theory of building relationships

Main concepts of the social penetration theory

Social penetration — the process of bonding that moves a relationship from superficial to more intimate [2]. The social penetration theory (SPT) was formulated by Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor and presented in their book “Social penetration: the development of interpersonal relationships" (1973). The theory [1] addresses the relational closeness between two people and the process of a relationship development. Social penetration theory states that interpersonal relationships develop gradually and in a particular direction which is similar for different pairs of people.

Key assumptions

The social penetration theory is based on four assumptions:

• Relationship development goes from superficial (non-intimate) layers to deeper intimate ones.
  Interpersonal communication begins with sharing general non-sensitive information. Can be followed by covert thoughts and feelings that person doesn’t share with everyone.
• Interpersonal relationships develop in a systematic and predictable manner (!). They have shared patterns for different people.
  The sequence of going from superficial to intimate layers is a pattern common for people. One can anticipate the sample relationship to develop successively through the same stages.
  
• Self-disclosure is the primary instrument to affect the relationship development.
  Self-disclosure is sharing personal thoughts, beliefs, plans, and other self-information with another person. It plays a central role in relational bonding, whether in romantic relationships, friendships, or professional contexts.
• Relationships can regress when costs outweigh rewards, leading to de-penetration and dissolution.
  As a relationship can develop further, going through disclosure stages, it can also go backwards by a person’s refusal to maintain communication at the same level of intimacy.

Onion model

Authors of the original social penetration theory pay great attention to the personality structure, or the onion model. The onion model serves as a visual representation of the social penetration domains. It describes the relationship development through the set of layers, like in an onion.

Superficial layers contain common information such as biographical data and preferences (in clothes, music, etc.). Middle layers include political views and social attitudes. Inner layers include spiritual values, deep fears, hopes, goals, fantasies, and secrets. The core of personality includes the most fundamental information, such as the purpose and the concept of self.

Through gradual self-disclosure, the people get to the deeper layers of the individuality, making the relationship closer.

Author’s note: the onion is indeed a very catchy representation. While its applicability should be studied further, the onion model is still referred quite often in materials about social penetration.

The onion-like model can operate with two coordinates: breadth and depth. Breadth is the range of different topics people can cover. Depth is the degree of intimacy, i.e., how likely the person is to disclose that information at the particular stage of the relationship.

Fig. 1. The onion model of personality layers

Sectors of the onion represent breadth, and the layers account for depth, obviously. Sometimes the external layer of that onion is called “public image” — what other people see by default.

Relationship stages

Social penetration theory can be categorized as the “stage theory” of relationships. These theories depict a relationship as the sequence of stage that people gradually come through. An impactful example of the stage theory is H. Peplau’s theory of interpersonal relations.

The authors of the social penetration theory attribute relationship development to four stages [1, 3, 4] (Taylor & Altman, 1987): orientation → exploratory affective exchange → affective exchange → stable exchange. Also, the de-penetration process occurs, when relationships regress, describing the backward moving.

> Orientation
‍That’s the initial phase of the interaction between strangers. Low depth and breadth.
> Exploratory affective exchange
‍This stage reflects mutual disclosure of more, but not very personal, information between partners.
> Affective exchange
‍Here the open communication of most non-intimate topics happens. Also the experimentation on disclosure of more sensitive topics increases.
> Stable exchange
‍In this stage of relationship development, communication is open between individuals essentially on all topics and at all levels of riskiness.

Author’s note: technically, relational stability is not to be assessed by the person: it’s rather an observable characteristic. So, it can’t really be “compared” to the outcome and satisfaction. We just stick to the original article’s terminology here.

Earlier studies (pre-social penetration theory)

Social penetration theory was devised by Taylor and Altman as the way to describe the dynamic nature of interpersonal relations and find shared predictable patterns. They used empirical evidence of interpersonal communication to formulate the main statements of the theory. The authors conducted several experiments on self-disclosure across different groups.

Breadth of disclosure for different layers (Taylor, 1968)

First, in a thirteen-week longitudinal study Taylor (1968) investigated development in male college students’ communication [5]. Four questions were introduced on repeated occasions during the semester. The social penetration degree was measured by the breadth of disclosure (number of topics shared) for the each of the four intimacy levels.

Fig. 2. Breadth of roommate disclosure over college semester (From D. Taylor study [5])

As you can see in Figure 2, the number of disclosed items at least has not decreased through the time of the experiment implying gradual relationship development.

Simulated scenarios (Frankfurt, 1965)

Another study referred to by Altman and Taylor is the one using written simulations of social situations by L. Frankfurt [6]. The interesting thing about methodology is that the author had not arranged the real communication between two people. He composed the scenarios of hypothetical relationship situations on paper, for instance, “You live together with a female roommate. She has a good attitude towards you. She tells you a lot about her family and home.”. The experiment participant (a real human) was offered to read the scenario and write an open-ended reasoning of what they would talk about with that “person”. The number of self-disclosure items (breath) from time for different intimacy (depth) categories are presented on Figure 3.

Fig. 3. Cumulative breadth of social penetration (From L. Frankfurt study [6])

Sharing physical space (Altman, I., Taylor, D. A., & Wheeler, L., 1971)

The third study to be mentioned is of interest as the physical extension of the social penetration theory [7]. Altman, Taylor, and Wheeler introduced the physical environment (chairs, beds, space usage) as a nonverbal dimension of social penetration. Compatible pairings increasingly shared space over time, while incompatible groups became territorial. These environmental dynamics mirrored verbal disclosure trends, providing multi-modal evidence for the gradual and reciprocal nature of penetration.

Validation (further studies of social penetration)

In this section, we would like to take a look at interesting studies that refer to the social penetration theory principles. The goal is to find out whether the key SPT assumptions hold up in subsequent experiments.

Evolution of disclosures in conversations (C.A. Vanlear, 1987)

C.A. Vanlear (1987) put up a question: “What is the nature of changes in the three levels of self-disclosure over time?” The author conducted a six-week longitudinal study of same-gender random pairs of people [8]. There were 7 random pairs of undergraduate students who had to have a 30-min conversation weekly; topic is not specified; over 6 weeks. These dyads (pairs) generated 13,972 acts of self-disclosure over the 42 conversations. Acts were labelled by two independent coders (people) according to the social penetration categories from Altman and Taylor: nonsubstantive utterances, public accessible utterances, semiprivate disclosure, private-personal disclosure. To check for reliability of these labels, the test of quasi-independence was conducted: whether the disagreements in labels had been random or there had been bias. For further analysis, authors took the public, semiprivate, and private disclosures.

To process the data, the author used polynomial trend and Markov analysis methods. The results of the trend analyses for public and semiprivate disclosures showed no significant effects of time. Although the analysis for private-personal disclosures shows a significant trend for changes over time. The form of it was quadratic: a slow start followed by a gradual increase to a peak during conversation #3, followed by a rather sharp decline. That supports assumption #1 from the key social penetration theory assumptions mentioned in the beginning of this article.

Business and personal disclosure for relationship development (S.M. Mangus et al, 2020)

The next is the study of social penetration theory in the sales context from S.M. Mangus et al. (2020). The authors investigate how business and personal self-disclosure affect the development of relationship [9]. The first part of the research involved qualitative interviews with a small group of participants (sales executives, salespeople, and customers). With the questions like: “Do you have a personal side to your business relationship, and if so, what are the advantages and disadvantages?” the authors outlined the hypotheses and factors they should pursue. From those, they built a structural scheme connecting relationship and business metrics (what affects what). The main research objective is testing the correlation between elements.

Then, authors introduced the survey to salespeople and customers of the logistics company. The survey consisted of several questions on the Likert scale (from 1 to 7) on different factors of relationships, such as business self-disclosure, personal self-disclosure, customer-felt empathy, and trust. From the survey data, Magnus et al. found out that business disclosure (β = 0.29, p ≤ 0.01) and personal disclosure (β = 0.36, p < .01) positively affected customer-felt relationship empathy. β here is the regression coefficient meaning that ~1/3 of the variation in perceived “understanding and care” in the relationship could be accounted for the amount of the self-disclosure. That supports assumption #3 from key SPT assumptions.

Self-disclosure in restaurant industry (J. Hwang, H. Han, & S. Kim, 2015)

Another similar study, “How employees can engage customers?” [10] is related to customer-server pairs in the restaurant industry. Authors surveyed 287 regular visitors of restaurants on several factors, such as customer disclosure, server disclosure, trust, etc. They observed the moderate dependence between the server disclosure and the trust establishment (“path coefficient” of structural mode is 0.235). That’s another notion for self-disclosure being a significant instrument of trust forming in the social penetration model.

Connection with other theories

In addition to the stage structure, the social penetration theory uses some concepts from other interpersonal theories. From a common sense, those concepts might be felt as intuitive, but we would still like to acknowledge them.

The first is the social exchange theory assuming that a person evaluates rewards and costs from the development of a particular relationship [11, 12]. The authors of SPT point out that reward/cost analysis is one of the primary drivers for relationship building or withdrawal.

The uncertainty reduction theory (Berger & Calabrese, 1974) suggests that people seek to reduce uncertainty in relationships through information‐seeking and communication [13]. It considers self-disclosure as one of the information sources in direct communication, overlapping with the social penetration theory.

Suggestions for future studies

General framework of the social penetration theory makes it applicable for a wide range of situations. But this same feature makes it not-so-applicable if one defines a relationship scope a little bit more thoroughly. Let’s talk about the scenarios that the social penetration theory might not cover very well.

Disclaimer: this section is of the great importance for the article because it a) contains original observations of the author b) suggests directions for further interpersonal relations studies.

SPT’s original assumptions don’t take into account the social impact of self-disclosure. The particular information and feelings, whether they are intimate or not, fit for particular roles and settings a person puts themselves in. That may lead to “skipping” personality levels pictured in the onion model violating SPT assumptions #1 and #2.
For example, one may not disclose their taste to the family members because they might not like that but share the deep fears and concerns. Or, a person can share core aspirations and views with a stranger, just because the context is welcoming.

The previous case brings up the privacy aspect of communication. Some intimate disclosures work only because the person feels safe — by not sharing their biographical data as well. For people participating in a political movement, looking for support on an anonymous forum, or confessing to a priest, sharing their personal data first can be disturbing and even dangerous. But it is still possible to establish trusted communication with people there. That doesn’t align with the SPT assumption of going from a superficial layer to intimate in a consistent manner.

Another aspect involves the applicability of the social penetration theory to the relationship building. Behavioural uncertainty is an important factor of relationship stability [13]. But is the information disclosed a good predictor of how a person acts? It might not be so, given privacy concerns and perceived benefits can introduce the discrepancy between self-disclosure and behaviour. That raises a question on the social penetration theory applications to dynamic relationships where behaviour is determined rather by reward/cost analysis (e.g., business, politics).

The third reason that limits the universality of the social penetration theory is the notion that the order of personality layers in the onion model might vary from person to person. For example, career goals can be a sensitive topic connected with a person’s dreams. Meanwhile, another might share the career expectations casually, just to find like-minded people. From that perspective, the actor can’t really tell how deep the relationship is by knowing the fact itself. One has to map the unique personality structure for every person, which can also turn out unstable, given previous considerations from this chapter.

Summary

Social penetration can develop in different contexts including romantic relationships, friendships, communities of interest, and working groups.

I. Altman and D. Taylor are considered the founders of the social penetration theory. They reviewed earlier studies and introduced key concepts in a book “Social penetration: The development of interpersonal relationships”.

The social penetration theory is based on 4 assumptions: a relationship between two people develops from superficial to intimate layers of personality, that happens predictably and systematically, the main instrument of moving through them is self-disclosure, regression is possible if costs outweigh the rewards from maintaining the relationship.

The onion model is a way to visually represent the personality structure. Its sectors account for the breadth of self-disclosure, and layers for the depth. The social penetration process is believed to unroll from outer layers to the core.

The social penetration theory is a “stage theory”. It features four stages of relationship development: orientation, exploratory affective exchange, affective exchange, stable exchange. They differ by breadth and depth.

These concepts of the social penetration theory may serve as a rough approximation of the relationship dynamics for any person. Consider them in your communications to build relationships thoughtfully!

References

• Altman, I., & Taylor, D. A. (1973). Social penetration: The development of interpersonal relationships. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
• West, R. L., & Turner, L. H. (2017). Introducing communication theory: Analysis and application (6th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
  
• Taylor, D. A., & Altman, I. (1987). Communication in interpersonal relationships: Social penetration processes.
• Braithwaite, D. O., & Schrodt, P. (Eds.). (2021). Engaging theories in interpersonal communication: Multiple perspectives. Routledge.
• Taylor, D. A. (1968). The development of interpersonal relationships: Social penetration processes. The Journal of Social Psychology, 75(1), 79-90.
• Frankfurt, L. P. (1965). THE ROLE OF SOME INDIVIDUAL AND INTERPERSONAL FACTORS ON THE ACQUAINTANCEPROCESS. American University.
• Altman, I., Taylor, D. A., & Wheeler, L. (1971). Ecological Aspects of Group Behavior in Social Isolation 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1(1), 76-100.
• Vanlear Jr, C. A. (1987). The formation of social relationships: A longitudinal study of social penetration. Human Communication Research, 13(3), 299-322.
• Mangus, S. M., Bock, D. E., Jones, E., & Folse, J. A. G. (2020). Examining the effects of mutual information sharing and relationship empathy: A social penetration theory perspective. Journal of Business Research, 109, 375-384.
• Hwang, J., Han, H., & Kim, S. (2015). How can employees engage customers? Application of social penetration theory to the full-service restaurant industry by gender. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 27(6), 1117-1134.
• Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. H. (1959). The social psychology of groups. John Wiley.
• Taylor, D. A., & Altman, I. (1975). Self-Disclosure as a Function of Reward-Cost Outcomes. Sociometry, 38(1), 18–31.
• Berger, C. R., & Calabrese, R. J. (1974). Some explorations in initial interaction and beyond: Toward a developmental theory of interpersonal communication. Human communication research, 1(2), 99-112.
• Low, S. M. P., Bolong, J., Waheed, M., & Wirza, J. (2022). 10-year systematic literature review of social penetration in online communication. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(14), 29-47.