Reminder avoidance: Why people hesitate to disclose their insecurities to friends.

Abstract

People seek and receive support from friends through self-disclosure. However, when self-disclosures reveal personal insecurities, do people rely on friends as an audience as they normally do? This research demonstrates that they do not. Five preregistered studies show that disclosers exhibit a weaker preference for friends as an audience when disclosures involve revealing personal insecurities than when they involve revealing other neutral or negative personal information. This effect is observed despite that the only alternative audience available to disclosers in these studies is a stranger. We theorize that such an effect occurs because disclosers anticipate stronger pain associated with being reminded of disclosed contents when their disclosures involve personal insecurities than other types of information and, thus, wish to avoid such reminders from happening. Our findings support this theorizing: (a) Disclosers' weaker preference for friends as an audience for insecurity-provoking (vs. noninsecurity-provoking) disclosure is mediated by how painful they anticipate reminders of disclosed contents to be and (b) disclosers' preference for a particular audience is diminished when the perceived likelihood of disclosed-content reminders associated with that audience is enhanced. An additional preregistered exploratory content-analysis study shows that when disclosing personal insecurities, people disclose less and are less intimate in what they disclose when they imagine a friend (vs. a stranger) as an audience. Altogether, disclosers are ironically found to open up less to friends about personal insecurities-self-aspects that may particularly benefit from friends' support-than about other topics, due to their avoidance of potentially painful disclosed-content reminders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).