This is exactly the kind of problem ChatGPT is good at solving. Just ask it and you will get theories. I asked and it gave a list, I think he talked about uncertainty reduction theory since the other things ChatGPT listed didn't make sense in this context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_reduction_theory

Edit: Not sure if that response is really correct, but at least it is a tractable way to try to approach this. ChatGPT let you fuzzy match words or theories much better than Google, and then you have things you can Google.

Funny that the GPT detector is giving 75-99 percent AI probability for that comment.