Diminishing self-disclosure to maintain security in partners’ care.

Six studies demonstrate that perceivers' desire to bond with targets motivates perceivers to misconstrue their own self-disclosure in ways that maintain perceivers' security in targets' care and commitment. Perceivers who strongly valued relationships with targets reported high levels of global self-disclosure, consistent with many findings suggesting salutary effects of disclosure. However, these same perceivers reported low self-disclosure of needs and desires in hypothetical (Study 1) and actual (Study 2) situations characterized by targets' unresponsive behavior. Similarly, in daily report (Study 3) and behavioral observation (Study 4) studies, perceivers who valued relationships with targets perceived high levels of self-disclosure when targets were responsive, but they perceived low self-disclosure when targets were unresponsive, and these perceptions seemed partly illusory. In turn, these perceptions of low self-disclosure in situations characterized by partners' unresponsive behavior predicted decreased perceptions of diagnosticity of targets' behavior (Studies 1-3) and buffered the negative affective and interpersonal effects of unresponsive behavior (Study 4). Experimental manipulations (Studies 5 and 6) demonstrated the motivational nature of perceived self-disclosure. Collectively, the results suggest that a desire to bond with targets motivates perceivers to downplay the diagnosticity of targets' unresponsive behavior through diminishing their self-disclosure, in turn preserving perceivers' trust in targets' care and commitment.