Invasions of Personal Space

Introduction

People like to maintain a certain distance from other people. How far we prefer to be from others depends on who they are and the setting we are in. The people we interact with tend to have the same preferences as us so we may not usually notice that we carefully maintain the same physical distance from each other during a given interaction. However, we may feel odd or uncomfortable if someone else 'breaks the rules' by being too close or too far away. The study of these unspoken rules of 'personal space' is called proxemics and was ...