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Key points
- The desire for personal space varies from person to person.
- Research has found that how much space we give others is linked to our personality, gender, age, and cultural backgrounds
- How close we position ourselves to others also can reflect how much we are attracted to them as friends or potential romantic partners
Imagine that you and a stranger are sitting on a couch. How close would you sit to them? It turns out the answer may say something about your personality.
In a study involving over 400 participants, researchers sought to understand how our personality may be linked to our tendency to give others personal space. The researchers first had people spend time interacting with a stranger, for example by playing several rounds of rock-paper-scissors.
Then they asked the participants to move to a couch for another part of the experiment. They found that people who were higher in the Big Five trait of agreeableness tended to sit closer to the other person (Hebel & Rentzch, 2022). The researchers also found some evidence that people who are rated higher in openness and extraversion by their interaction partner also tended to sit closer.
Other individual differences, such as gender and age, can also affect personal space. Women tend to prefer more physical distance from strangers or acquaintances and older adults also generally tend to prefer to keep more distance between themselves and others (Sorokowska, et al., 2018).
Culture and Personal Space
Beyond reflecting our personality and demographics, the amount of personal space we prefer is also linked to our cultural backgrounds. In a study involving nearly 9,000 participants from 42 countries, Sorokowska and colleagues (2018), found that around the world people’s desired amount of personal space, or “preferred interpersonal distance,” varied substantially. For example, in Romania, the average amount of personal space people said they’d prefer from a stranger was more than 4 feet, whereas in Argentina it was roughly half that.
What might underlie this variation? The researchers looked at a number of potential factors, but the only one that was significantly associated with preferred interpersonal distance was average temperature. The warmer the place, it seems, the "warmer" the people and the less space they needed between them and others.
Culture also affects the likelihood we will actively create space for ourselves by moving objects in the environment. In a clever set of field studies Talhelm and colleagues (2018) placed chairs in the aisles of the seating areas in Starbucks in different regions of China. The researchers then observed whether customers chose to move the chairs or squeeze by them.
Consistent with other regional cultural differences that the team had previously documented (Talhelm, et al., 2014), people in Northern regions of China, tended to remove the chairs, whereas those in Southern regions of China were more likely to try to squeeze between them. Talhelm suggests that these differences reflect variations in levels of individualism, a finding that was consistent with the results they observed when repeating this experiment and comparing the results between China, Japan, and the United States.
Personal Space and Attraction
Finally, personal space may also reflect interpersonal attraction. As Hebel and Retnzch (2022) found, our chosen physical proximity also appears to reflect how much we like others. The more people in their experiment indicated that they would like to be friends with the other person, the closer they sat to them.
It’s also widely held that people tend to express sexual interest in others by increasing physical proximity, such as by leaning close to them. Interestingly the amount of space we take up in an environment may also be a cue to potential romantic partners. In a study that had people take part in a speed dating event, another team of researchers found that people who sat in more open, expansive postures were rated as more sexually attractive by their dates (Vacharkulksemsuk, Reit, & Carney, 2016).
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, we can learn a lot from looking at how close people want to be to others and how they use the space around themselves. It turns out that personal space can provide a window into people’s basic personality traits. It can also give us clues as to where someone comes from and whether or not they like us.
References
Hebel, V., & Rentzsch, K. (2022). One, two, three, sit next to me: Personality and physical distance. Personality and Individual Differences, 198, 111798.
Sorokowska, A., Sorokowski, P., Hilpert, P., Cantarero, K., Frackowiak, T., Ahmadi, K., ... & Pierce Jr, J. D. (2017). Preferred interpersonal distances: A global comparison. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 48, 577-592.
Talhelm, T., Zhang, X., Oishi, S., Shimin, C., Duan, D., Lan, X., & Kitayama, S. (2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture. Science, 344, 603-608.
Talhelm, T., Zhang, X., & Oishi, S. (2018). Moving chairs in Starbucks: Observational studies find rice-wheat cultural differences in daily life in China. Science Advances, 4, eaap8469.
Vacharkulksemsuk, T., Reit, E., Khambatta, P., Eastwick, P. W., Finkel, E. J., & Carney, D. R. (2016). Dominant, open nonverbal displays are attractive at zero-acquaintance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(15), 4009-4014.
