The Spaces Between Us: The unconscious rules of personal space

S.O.T.T: Everyone has a personal space, an instinctive protective zone. We're always jostling to maintain our own space and to navigate around others', and the honeycomb of abutting spaces forms the scaffold of our social world. Violating it as a means of social communication, a means of bullying, is common behavior.

But we usually don't do it in a calculated way. The rules of personal space run deep under the surface of consciousness. We act and react in an elaborate, animal dance, and only extreme examples-like the Trump handshake-catch our conscious attention.

The instinctive dance of personal space was first studied scientifically by a zoo curator, Heini Hediger, who directed the Zürich Zoo in the 1950s. Zoo animals tend to be comfortable only if their cages are properly shaped and sized to form a protective territory. But when studying animals in the wild, Hediger noticed a second kind of territory, a smaller, portable bubble of space attached to the body. He called it an escape distance, or a flight zone...read more>>>....