Situational Support,Privacy Regulation,and Stress

There is substantial evidence that people have difficulty asking someone to leave in order to obtain solitude. This study evaluated the hypotheses that (a) people regulate privacy to the extent that they feel supported by the social and physical environments, (b) people who reject an intruder will cite situational pressures that legitimize their behavior, (c) rejecting an intruder can itself be stressful, but (d) verbalizations that legitimize regulation can help pevent or reduce the stress. Participants were performing a task that required solitude when confronted with an intruder. Social/normative (informative signs) and environmental (visitor's chair placement) cues favoring or opposing regulation of the intruder were manipulated in a 2 x 2 factorial design. As hypothesized, participants were most likely to reject the intruder if they had both environmental and informational support for doing so. People generally cited task pressures when confronted with the intruder, but when the sign and the chair supported regulation, they cited the task less and the situation (especially the chair) more. There was little support for the hypothesis that regulating an intruder without situational support would be stressful; however, verbal justification for regulation (i.e., citation of more external pressures) was generally related to lower indices of stress. The results support the idea that people read and use situational cues when controlling their solitude.