Social Penetration

Will Watson 1. Social Penetration is the theory that allows you to go deeper and deeper into private and personal matters, which exposes vulnerability and trust has to be developed along the way. In the case study “See you later?” Diane Feil (who is 34 years; very friendly, but maintains her reserve) has her car in the shop so she does not have the ability under her own circumstances to fill up her refrigerator with her own transportation. Her nice neighbor Bob O’Connell (who is 44 years old, eyes exude both friendship and emptiness; a kind man) decides to offer her a ride to a nearby coffee shop so that she can get something to drink since she was talking about how she is exhausted which is the key descriptive term personality structure (pg .114). When they finally reach the coffee shop and sit down and they start to get to talking more and more about their personal lives. Bob and Diane start talking about their relationship status, she has a husband who is absentee at the moment and he tells her about his wife who had passed away 4 months ago, they go on and on “voluntary sharing of personal information with one another which is self-disclosure” (pg.114). 2. The conversation is happening because both of them share a common interested that allowed them to connect to one another. Law of Reciprocity is a paced and orderly process where openness in one person leads to openness in another person (law-like causal determinism) (pg.116). This happens in the conversation between Diane and Bob when they start talking about the things that matter most to them. For example when Bob bought his wife who died four months ago and then she acknowledge what he said and decided to share a story about her writing a book on human relations. 3. With the descriptive terms and theoretical terms I can predict that Diane and Bob will not be seeing each other later. Although they both shared a common interest in human relations, I think that they went to fast at the coffee shop