Personal Opacity and Social Information Gathering

Abstract

Tactics by which individuals withhold information from inquisitive others were explored by inducing individuals to achieve varying goals in conversational encounters. Persons were told to reveal as little as they could about themselves (low revealers), as much as they could about themselves (high revealers), or to have a typical conversation (normals). These individuals were paired in conversation with persons told to find out as much as they could about their conversational partner (high seekers). Information-quality, self-presentation, conversational-management, behavioral, content-focus, and utterance-form tactics were explored. Information-quality and content-focus tactics are the most important tactics for evasion plans, whereas pausal phenomena seem to be indicative of on-line planning of evasiveness. Implications for the study of the negativity effect and disclosure research are discussed.