Proxemics Revisited: Similar Effects of Arms Length on Men's and Women's Personal Distances

Abstract

Handbooks of human communication describe personal distance as a protective bubble surrounding our body and stress the role of sex (along with other cultural and situational factors) in stretching and shrinking it. Using data from a simulated dyadic interaction procedure, we show that putative effects of sex may be explained by effects of one's arm length in same-­sex and different-­sex interactions. This suggests that biological factors related to the body schema provide the crucial constraints on the use of personal space for communication.