I rememeber the social penetration theory from Comm 101. It talked about how a person's personality is like an onion, going deeper and deeper with each layer. The book also says that a part of this theory is the concept of rewards and costs, how a person will stay in a relationship if the rewards are higher than the costs, and will not stay if the costs are greater. If they stay with higher costs, it will not be a negative relationship and the participants will most likely not be happy. This is like a woman who gets beat up, but stays because she is scared to do something about it, or whatever the reason.
In Comm 101 though, we talked about that being a different theory, the social exchange theory.
Maybe social exchange theory is a bullet under social penetration theory.
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I do think it is strange how we sometimes get into these relationships with people we know probably are not the best. I think interpersonal relationships are connected deeply to emotions and the mind. I have been in a friendship before that was not exactly healthy, but it was so hard to cut it off because it was so manipulative. Thankfully now I am not so naïve to people and pick my closest friends whom I trust carefully and purposefully.
I like the example of an abused woman staying with someone because the rewards are greater than the cost, but I feel like that is how it is with everything. The same concept could be appplied to anything, a job, having children, going to school. I feel like our society is based on people having that social exchange theory. Nobody likes working, but if the money outweighs the discontentment of working, then we work. Companies work the same way, they are meant to function with everyone looking out for themselves and are designed to find thatperfect balance between work and compensation.
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