psych 372 environmental psychology (10 privacy)

8/11/2019 Psych 372 Environmental Psychology (10 Privacy)

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PrivacyPsychology 372



What we‟ll cover

• Biological antecedents to privacy

• Signalling and deception in animals

• Privacy in early humans

• The influence of sedentation

• Some factors influencing privacy

• Theories of privacy

• Applications - cyberprivacy



Biological antecedents to privacy and eavesdr

• Signals (using some form of information produced by another to learn sometthe world)

• Deliberate signals like alarm calls

• Alarm calls are used by a wide variety of different types of animals



Not all signals are intended to communicate

• In an experiment with gerbils, I showed that the likelihood of flight from a mildinfluenced by what others do.

• The direction of flight is influenced by where others go.

Observer Actor



Interspecific signalling

• In the Galapagos Islands, both iguanas and mockingbirds are preyed upon b

• Mockingbirds make alarm calls

• Iguanas run

• The lesson here is that signals can be promiscuous in the sense thaavailable to all, even though they may not have evolved for the bene



Being more savvy about signals: Deception in jays• Jays cache food

• They will re-cache or even feint cache food when they see that they are bein(but not when alone)



Many other examples of animals being selectivabout signals

• “twittering” blackbirds

• Siamese fighting fish males will not try to mate with a female who saw them l

• Many examples in primates too

• Primates, including us, pay a lot of attention to where others are looking and what t

• For example, subordinate monkeys will prefer food that a dominant monkey cannot see



Living in groups

• It‟s long been thought that the main advantage of group living is shared vigila

• A group of antelope, for example, can devote more time to foraging if they can shartime

• This has been shown to be true at a micro-scale – both birds and ruminants show changesbehaviour depending on group size and even on their position within a group.

Cowbi

Head-



Benefits of life in a group has limits

• Generally, as group size increases, the complexity of signalling within the groincrease

• Theoretically, group size will reach a point where the positives are outweighe

• 1. competition for resources

• 2. information overload – the group members will begin to have to pay so much attewhat‟s happening inside the group that they neglect what‟s happening outside the g



Big social life=big brains

• Generally, the advantages of being able to manage social information may habigger brains

• An animal may have to remember who is whom, who‟s done what to whom, when ihow others responded.

• Robin Dunbar has suggested that such abilities have been one of the main drivers evolution

• There is an especially strong trend for monogamous animals to be big-brained

• Humans, as an officially “mildly polygynous” species, qualifies • Skills needed to manage monogamy would also be available to manage other kinds of intim

relationships other than with one‟s primary person



To summarize so far:

• The world of animals is filled with useful information

• Some of this information is generated “deliberately” by animals for the purpose of cbut some of it is incidental

• Information crosses species boundaries

• Where a signal is produced deliberately, there is lots of latitude for deception

• Many animals have rudiments of what we might consider to be a “theory of mind” inthat they can anticipate the consequences of what another animal has seen or hea

• Groups provide vigilance savings but require new kinds of abilities to do well, whichincreasing cost with increasing group size.



Social organization of early, small human settle

• Kung

• Bands of about 35 individuals

• A “home” was for reaching in

• Hearths in very close proximity

• Essentially all information was shared



Other small community cultures

• Pitjantjatjarara of Australia

• Almost identical layout to the Kung camps

• Semai of Malaya

• Really no strong concept of privacy. Anthropologist Robert Dentan lived with Sema

• Midnight visits

• “They would cough a few times to see if we were awake or ask in clear

voices “you sleeping?” If we pretended to be asleep and they had nothdo, they would settle down to chat with each other. A person who drophimself might just sit for a while, humming a little tune, or he might rumthrough our belongings in hopes of turning up something interesting.”



Benefits of open-plan communities

• All information is shared

• There is no such thing as trust – it‟s not really needed because there are few

• This may be the only way that a small egalitarian community can be maintain

• There can be a measure of privacy, but it isn‟t unilateral, imposed privacy.

• By consensual agreement, people choose not to look. Privacy is requested and cothan being taken

• “they know what they‟re not looking at.”

(Note that this is roughly what Gifford is describing in Roma communities)



Contrast this with the modern

• We are now preoccupied with privacy

• We define many different types of privacy, we have massive numbers of laws to proto privacy, and perhaps most importantly for us, there is an enormous amount of deinto providing and maintaining privacy



So what happened?

• Sedentation (we settled down).

• The birth of agriculture made it easier for us to stay in one place than to follow the f

• Indeed, this was probably essential for survival (decrease in herds, climate change favouri

• This advantage caused a huge upward pressure for larger settlements

• It quickly became impossible for us to maintain small egalitarian settlements

• Large settlements need central planning, rules, policies in short we need politics and hie

• These massive changes had profound consequences for privacy

• Large groups meant it was no longer possible for us to know everyone we lived with

• There was both pressure for us to protect ourselves from those we didn‟t know, but also to protect massive cognitive cost of getting to know all these people (we can‟t turn off our signal detection cir

• Unlike in small egalitarian groups, it was no longer an option to leave



The birth of dwellings

• In response, and for the first time, we see dwellings whose main function is to

privacy

• Amos Rapaport spent his life studying homes in different cultures

• He found the ill fit between home style and climate to be remarkable

• Some cultures that lived in cold conditions built rudimentary shelters

Some tropical cultures built elaborate homes with thick walls

He never completely understood why, but his work made it clear that the home was not, at least not j

Home spaces, with less permeable walls, provided the relief of privacy



15,000 years ago, we all lived outside together

• Now, if you were to somehow swoop across the planet, you would only actua

fraction of all the people who live on planet Earth.

• Then, if you‟d done the same thing, you would have seen most of them.

• -this state of affairs persisted for some thousands of years after domestication bega

• Suggests resistance



Consequences of this shift inside are hard tooverestimate

• Evolution of trust

• And along with, vast changes in what morality means

• “virtue untested is no virtue at all”

• Evolution of eavesdropping

• In a time when it is the norm to protect part of ourselves, there will be incentives to that protection

• Everything from espionage to gossip represents an attempt to breach privacy, usually for g

• For a long time, eavesdropping was a serious crime

• Evolution of a distinction between public and private life

• Think of the effort that‟s put into preserving your public face



Eavesdropping



Summary so far

• “wild” humans living in small egalitarian societies have very little privacy by c

• Sedentism caused group sizes to increase massively, making the social systsocieties intractable

• To cope with density increase, we made walls

• Walls generate a need for complex moral codes, systems of justice, the evoland much more sophisticated notions of privacy



What is privacy now?

• Solitude – being alone

• Anonymity – being alone in a crowd

• Intimacy – being separate with another

• Reserve – having a barrier against intrusion



Altman‟s theory of privacy (though it‟s less a thand more a kind of organizing framework)

• The essential ingredient of privacy is control

• The three elements

• 1. boundary control mechanism – you may let people in or not. You decide

• 2. dialectical interplay – we don‟t always want to be alone and we don‟t always wantothers. When privacy is functioning properly, it‟s optimizing

• 3. multi-mechanism process

• Walls and doors

• Non-verbal behaviour

• Verbal behaviour

• Clothing



Functions of privacy

• Communication

• We need to have control over who we give information to or we will be reluctant to commun

• Control

• We need to feel autonomous, and controlling access to ourselves is a part of that

• Identity

• We need to withdraw from our public selves in order to integrate new experiences

• This can‟t be done effectively while in public

• Emotional release



Relationships between personal space, territorprivacy and crowding

• Privacy is really paramount personal space and territoriality are really the

by which privacy is achieved

• Crowding is the failure of privacy



What‟s happening with cyber -privacy?

• The walls that we began building 10,000 years ago are now coming down – i

privacy is becoming very difficult to maintain• In many ways, we are still trying to adjust to this transition

• Most of us seem quite willing to voluntarily submit personal information to so(and many other places), even though this information is virtually indelible.

• The Facebook newsfeed controversy is instructive



Facebook newsfeed controversy

• In 2006, FB introduced „newsfeed‟ which transformed profile information from

from „pull‟ format to „push‟ format

• Note that this change did not change the availability of any information on FB

• There was a massive outcry

• FB responded with a short burst of intensive effort to re-vamp privacy controlallow people to opt out of newsfeed

• The main lesson here is again about perceived control

• It wasn‟t the availability of information in absolute terms that upset people, but that digested by “strangers” and made easily available to people (even though those peselected).



Final summary

• Real privacy, in the way that most of us understand it, is a recent invention dr

need to live in large groups

• The evolution of privacy is related to many other features of human life that wtrust and morality, autonomy and personhood (to the extent that such things existed before sedentism, they must have looked different)

• Modern conceptions of privacy describe a number of different variants, but ththem seems to be control

• Privacy in the age of electronic social media is undergoing important change

psych 372 environmental psychology (10 privacy)

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