Social Penetration Theory

The Social Penetration theory is the “process of developing deeper intimacy with another person through mutual self-disclosure and other forms of vulnerability” (Griffin, Ledbetter & Sparks, 2015, p. 97).  Altman and Taylor describe social penetration through an onion, made up of multiple layers. The outside layers are what people display to the world, or their physical appearance.  On the inside, are your values, self-concepts, and emotions (Griffin, Ledbetter & Sparks, 2015).  The chapter uses the example of two roommates so I will also use the example of when I first met my roommate, Jamie.  Like the roommates described in the chapter, we took a while to get to know each other.  It probably took two months before we began to enter a deeper friendship and begin sharing our values and secrets with each other.  According to Altman and Taylor and the depth of penetration, we began to share and disclose details to each other which initiated a close friendship.  Once friends begin to disclose these types of emotions and values, they can easily talk about their feelings with each other with little fear of being judged by the other person.  If they can maintain a stable relationship, these topics can easily be talked about between the two.  My friendship with Jamie was slow to come, but once we started to disclose, for example, our fears about being at school without our parents and being new to the college swim team and not feeling accepted by the upperclassmen, we became more comfortable with each other.

Once Jamie and I began to become closer, we didn’t need to guard our “deepest layer of the onion.”  Jamie knew my true feelings and she knew mine.  If we ever talked about something sensitive to the other person, we could usually get through it without being awkward.  We didn’t often have this problem, because we trusted each other and didn’t withdraw from one another when we were uncomfortable.  I’ve known other people that aren’t friends anymore because they said or did something that the other friend could not forgive.  This can be described through Altman and Taylor’s process of de-penetration.  This is when penetration is reversed and the friendship starts to deteriorate (Griffin, Ledbetter & Sparks, 2015).  One bad incident or situation can cause a friendship to end, but that seems to be rare and pretty extreme.  If a friendship is stable, social penetration was successful, like my friendship with my roommate. 

References

Griffin, E. A., Ledbetter, A., & Sparks, G. (2015). A first look at communication theory (9th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.