What confiding a secret commits you to

The most used name generator in the world, introduced into the American General Social Survey in 1985, rests on discussing important matters. Confiding therefore serves as the operator delimiting the core of the network, which gives it a particular status in this field.

That choice is not neutral: it defines closeness by a verbal act, which mechanically produces the measured gaps between groups whose norms of expression differ.

Mario Small showed in 2017, in Someone to Talk To, that people also confide, and often, in relationships that are not close, chosen for their availability or their competence at the time. The criterion therefore does not always carve out the core it claims to delimit.

Research on keeping secrets, notably by Michael Slepian and colleagues, published from 2017 onwards, distinguishes the act of concealing within an interaction from thinking about the secret outside any interaction.

Their results attribute most of the measured burden to the second situation, a counter-intuitive result that shifts the question from concealment to preoccupation. Participants report thinking about their secrets far more often than they have to hide them from someone.

Work on disclosure finds an association between reciprocal confiding and reported closeness. The direction of the link is hard to establish, since one confides more readily in those one feels close to. The idea of a closeness that progresses through successive layers of disclosure was formalised by Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor in 1973 under the name of social penetration.

Experimental protocols of progressive disclosure try to settle it by imposing the sequence, such as the one by Arthur Aron and colleagues published in 1997, but they measure immediate closeness in an artificial situation, which limits their reach.

Surveys on the end of friendships place the disclosure of a confidence among the most often cited motives for explicit rupture. The result is consistent with the place of confiding in the very definition of closeness: to disclose a secret is to strike at what delimited the tie.

That finding is collected after the fact and concerns clean breaks, which are a minority. It says nothing about the frequency of disclosure itself, which is not measured. It mainly tells what people remember of a friendship's end, which is not necessarily what caused it.

Receiving a confidence places one in a particular position, little studied: listening has a cost, and work on support finds a burden among people regularly called upon. Research on family carers has long described this burden, but rarely between friends.

That dimension is almost absent from measurement instruments, which ask about the availability of a confidant without asking what that position demands of them.