Personal Space (AQA GCSE Psychology)

Personal space & communication

• Personal space consists of the area around yourself that you consider to be ‘out of bounds’ to most people and that only close, intimate friends/partners/family members may enter 

• The diagram below shows how most people (in Westernised cultures such as the UK) conceptualise personal space (notice how the space is divided into zones)

Personal space diagram

Personal space can be divided into zones

Culture

• Personal space will differ depending on different factors, one of which is culture:

  • The level of formality (which is also relevant for status differences below) in a country such as Japan can be seen in adherence to maintaining more distance between each other, particularly if one person is of higher rank than the other person

  • One generalisation is

    • that people from the USA prefer to speak to people using an arm’s length distance

    • people from Mediterranean Europe prefer to be wrist length apart

    • people from the Middle East are happy with an elbows length apart

  • Climate may be a factor in personal space, with the idea that people from warmer climates (‘contact’ cultures) have less need for personal space than those from colder, ‘non-contact’ cultures as warm weather makes people feel more relaxed (Sorokowska et al. 2017)

Gender

• Males and females may have different attitudes towards personal space:

  • Males are more likely to prefer more distance than females when it comes to same-sex interactions

• Preferences for personal space may be a result of social conditioning:

  • females are generally more likely to be encouraged to form close bonds with friends, to be caring, and nurturing, and to focus on feelings and relationships than men are (though this is of course, a rather stereotyped way of viewing gender norms)

• Fisher & Byrne (1975) found that female students responded more negatively to side-by-side invasions of personal space (a stranger sitting next to them in the library) while males responded more negatively to face-to-face invasions (a stranger sitting opposite them in the library) 

• Nassiri et al. (2010) investigated personal space in Collaborative virtual environments (CVE)) and found that the gender of avatars in the CVE did not result in either male or female participants experiencing anxiety about having their space invaded (which contrasts to how females particularly might feel about personal space invasion in the real world)

Personal space diagram

Invasion of personal space may be viewed as a threat.

Status

• Status simply refers to the level which confers value or respect on an individual either formally (e.g. a school Principal) or informally (e.g. the leader of a gang of teenagers)

• As mentioned above, some cultures place a high value on social hierarchies and this can be seen in the use of personal space surrounding people of different rank (e.g. in a Japanese company the executive director would be given more personal space than other people lower down the hierarchy)

• People of equal status tend to use a closer distance than people of unequal status e.g. two factory workers will use a closer distance than a factory worker and the factory owner (Zahn, 1991)

• Maher & von Hippel (2005) asked 109 office workers - via a questionnaire -  how they felt about working in an Open-plan office:

  • their findings showed that participants with low perceived privacy reported lower levels of job  satisfaction and enjoyment i.e. a lack of personal space boundaries may be linked to a negative mood

Evaluation of personal space

Strengths

• There are some good applications for the use of personal space in the real world: when travelling to other cultures, when communicating with the opposite sex or the boss at work, even when deciding where to sit on a bus

• Research into personal space tends to use the self-report method which - in the form of a questionnaire - can be replicated in high numbers to check for reliability

Weaknesses

• One of the downsides of using the self-report method to gather data is that participants may succumb to social desirability bias and not answer the questions with complete honesty

• Research on personal space may be overly simplistic as it does not take into account an array of factors which may also contribute to distances between people e.g. personality, upbringing, religion etc.