Gender and Situational Context Moderate the Relationship Between Self‐Monitoring and Induction of Self‐Disclosure

Male and female undergraduates who differed in degree of self-monitoring interviewed same-sex strangers to test the hypothesis that interviewer self-monitoring propensities foster self-disclosure only in disclosure-conducive contexts (i.e., collaborative contexts for men and social-expressive contexts for women). Results indicated that high self-monitoring (but not low self-monitoring) interviewers of each gender were notably more successful at eliciting personal information in the contexts generally considered amenable to male and female self-disclosure than in disclosure-nonconducive contexts. Moreover, male high self-monitoring interviewers reliably elicited more information than their low self-monitoring counterparts only in the disclosure-conducive (for men) collaborative context. However, high self-monitoring female interviewers did not elicit more information than their dispositional counterparts in disclosure-conducive, social-expressive contexts, although they reliably induced less disclosure than low self-monitors in the disclosure-nonconducive (for women) collaborative context.