2) Rules for Concealing and Revealing

People control their private information through the use of personal privacy rules.

People have rules on how they personally manage their personal information 

Definition; Rule Based Theory: Theory that assumes we can best understand people freely chosen actions if we study the system of rules they use to interpret and manage their lives.

Five factors CPM used in way we develop privacy rules

• Culture- Each culture has different values and ideas openness and disclosure. 
• U.S. Citizens are very individualistic. Which means that for privacy they have a bias towards, locking doors, keeping secrets and preserving privacy. 
• In other countries there has not been very many studies done on their cultures affecting how the handle private information but it has been found that when  a child suffers from silence it differs from culture to culture.

There was s study done with 20 Jewish Israeli mothers about telling there children the divorce they were going through with the children father. It was a study that had 20 woman ages 31-50, has been married anywhere from 3-23 years and the mother had at least one child under 18 living at home. In this study they adopted the approach of Communication Privacy Management in seeing the relationship from the mother telling the child about the private information but the mothers chose what to share and what to keep to themselves. (Cohan, pg.35)

The Results:

• 11 out of 20 woman were able to have the initial conversion with their children
• 4 of the mothers throughout that there child was too young (6 and 7 year old were just given a brief description on where they were moving, but no explanation they could understand).
• 4 mothers avoided the initial conversation because they claimed their child knew what was going on.
• 1 mother had a really hard time disclosing the information to her son because she was a victim of sexual violence, and she disclosed her information to school staff which helped her tell her son. This gave her more emotional strength in the disclosure.

In this case there were some mothers that felt at risk for telling there child about the divorce and those were the mothers that chose not to in sake of their children and it being a harmful to the children. The mothers who did participate believed that the benefits outweighed the risks.

In the end it was found that through the Communication Privacy Management theory mothers used the basic disclosure with their children that did not involve much conversion but allowing the mothers to disclose and move on, not disclosing all the information the mother had prepared in sake of the child's well-being. Later on was when the children began to ask more questions and there was more disclosure happening between the mothers and the child. (Cohan, pg.37)

In every culture there is going to be different ways to handle divorce but even in the culture of the Israeli mothers there were different aspects on why they chose to disclose information to their children, and how they chose to tell their children. In the Israeli culture divorce is known as a very harmful thing to children in the culture so there was a lot of information that was not told. Along with that a child's relationships needs to be in good standing with their fathers as that is part of the Israeli culture. Therefore the mothers were the ones to tell the children about the divorce and keeping their father at good standing in the children's eyes no matter the circumstance. (Cohan, pg. 38)

As Culture has a big play in concealing or reliving information there are 4 others factors. 

• Gender- Woman disclose more then men according to popular wisdom, but that is NOT correct. Men and woman are just as likely to share private information. But both men and woman are more likely to reveal the private information to a woman over a man. 
• Motivation- Attraction and liking of a person can serve as an interpersonal motivation that can loosen privacy boundaries that usually would not be reached.
• Context- Traumatic events can temporally or permanently disrupt the influence of culture, gender, and motivation when people craft their rules of privacy.
• Something traumatic can get a person to revel information when they normally would not or it could make someone shut not and not communication when they usually would. Showing that they need time to cope but will most likely open up when doing everyday things; cooking, shopping, watching a movie, ect. 
• Risk/ benefit ratio- does the math for revealing as well as concealing private information

                        RISK                                                                        BENEFITS

                 Embarrassment                                                         Relief from stress
                 Rejection                                                                  Gain social support
                 Diminished Power                                                   Draw closer to person we tell
                 Everyone finding out secret                                     Change to influence others