Secrets Across Social Distance: Beliefs, Norms, and the Role of the Relationship Context in Disclosure Willingness

Secrecy is common in everyday life, yet deciding whether to disclose a negative personal secret requires people to weigh possible relief against anticipated social costs. Existing research shows that secrecy can be burdensome, but less is known about how disclosure judgments vary across the broader social network of possible recipients. The present study examined disclosure willingness across eight relationship contexts: stranger, acquaintance, neighbor, colleague, friend, close friend, family member, and romantic partner. Participants (N = 200) rated how willing people should be to disclose a negative personal secret, how willing they personally would be to disclose their own secret, how much they would want another person to disclose a similar secret to them, and how disclosure would affect impressions and future relationships or interactions. Normative disclosure willingness differed significantly across relationship contexts, with willingness lowest for socially distant targets and highest for close friends and romantic partners. Personal willingness to disclose was lower than normative disclosure judgments in close relationship contexts, suggesting a divergence between what participants believed people should disclose and what they were personally willing to disclose. Self–role-reversal comparisons further suggested that participants were generally more willing to receive a similar disclosure from another person than to make the disclosure themselves. Exploratory models indicated that anticipated impression change and anticipated relationship/interactions change were both associated with personal disclosure willingness, whereas secrecy burden did not predict willingness differently as a joint function of anticipated damage and relationship context. These findings suggest that disclosure judgments are shaped by relationship-specific concerns about social evaluation and future relational consequences.