The Environment and Social Behaviour. Privacy Personal Space, Territory, Crowding

This book presents an analysis of the concepts of privacy, crowding, territory, and personal space, with regard to human behavior. It presents an introduction to the environment-and-behavior field for undergraduate and graduate students, as a preliminary guide to research and theory for researchers, and as a model for integrating environmental and social concepts for practitioners. The book contains the following discussions: a brief description of the four central concepts; an analysis of privacy in terms of meaning, conceptions, mechanisms, and dynamics; an examination of personal space as it relates to meaning, theory, research, and special topics; and an analysis of both crowding and territory, again with a focus on research and theory.

Below, for easy reference, are some excerpts that I have quoted in my own research into PETs.

[Excerpt from pp. 10-12.]

Privacy: Definitions and Properties

Introduction

[…]

This chapter attempts to elevate the concept of privacy to a central place in the environment and behavior field. To telegraph our discussion, the following features of privacy will be considered.

1. Privacy is an interpersonal boundary-control process, which paces and regulates interaction with others. Privacy regulation by persons and groups is somewhat like the shifting permeability of a cell membrane. Some times the person or group is receptive to outside inputs, and sometimes the person or group closes off contact with the outside environment.
2. Two important aspects of privacy are desired privacy and achieved privacy. Desired privacy is a subjective statement of an ideal level of interaction with others – how much or how little contact is desired at some moment in time. Achieved privacy is the actual degree of contact that results from interaction with others. If the desired privacy is equal to the achieved privacy, an optimum state of privacy exists. If achieved privacy is lower or higher than desired privacy - too much or too little contact – a state of imbalance exists.
3. Privacy is a dialectic process, which involves both a restriction of interaction and a seeking of interaction. A traditional view of privacy is that it is a shutting off of the self from others. My view is that privacy is profitably conceived of as an interplay of opposing forces – that is, different balances of opening and closing the self to others. Sometimes a person (or a group) wants to be alone and out of contact with others. At other times social interaction is desired. I believe that the whole range of openness-closedness of the person or group should be included in the idea of privacy. In fact, I shall argue that privacy is a dynamic process that has forces pushing toward a certain level of openness-closedness or accessibility-inaccessibility, with the relative strength of opposing forces shifting over time and with different circumstances.
4. Privacy is an optimizing process. In other words, there is an optimal degree of desired access of the self to others at any moment in time. And deviation from this optimum in the direction of either too much or too little interaction is unsatisfactory. For example, if a person wanted to have a hypothetical “fifty units” of interaction with another person, actual interaction outcomes of “zero units” or “one hundred units” of interaction would both be unsatisfactory. Thus the idea of privacy as an optimization process means that departures from an ideal in either of two directions – higher or lower – is unsatisfactory.
5. Privacy is an input and output process; people and groups attempt to regulate contacts coming from others and outputs they make to others. It is important to understand how people and groups regulate privacy with regard to what comes in from others and what goes out from the person or the group to others.
6. Privacy can involve different types of social units: individuals, families, mixed or homogeneous sex groups, and so on. Sometimes we speak of privacy in terms of one person's blocking off or seeking contact with another person. At other times we can speak of groups' seeking or avoiding contact with other groups or individuals. Thus privacy can involve a great diversity of social relationships – individuals and individuals, individuals and a group, groups and individuals, and so on.
7. Another aspect of my analysis concerns behavioral mechanisms used to achieve privacy goals. These mechansims include (a) verbal and paraverbal behavior, or the content and style of verbal responses, (b) personal space or the areas immediately surrounding persons or groups, defined in terms of distance and angle of orientation from others, (c) territory, or the use, possesion, and ownership of areas and objects in a geographical locale, and (d) cultural mechanisms, or the customs, norms, and styles of behavior by which members of different cultural groups regulate their contact with other. And, most important, these different behaviors operate as a unified system, amplifying, substituting and complementing one another.
8. A final feature of the discussions deals with privacy functions. Three basic components of privacy regulation are identified: (a) control and management of personal interaction, (b) plans, roles and strategies for dealing with others, and (c) features of self-identity.