I hate people when they’re not polite.
While I am not (yet) a psycho killer (qu’est-ce que c’est?) I have noticed a growing rage inside of me.
For almost two years, here in Melbourne, all human interaction was governed by very clear rules. Stay home. When you go out, wear a mask. Stay 1.5 metres away from people. Simple. Easy. No one who I didn’t want in my personal space was in my personal space. When they got in my personal space I could, with the backing of science, tell people, to differing degrees of politeness, to get the heck out of my personal space.
Despite the pandemic not really being over and people still dying from ever emerging mutant strains of our original spiky viral friend, life has sorta returned to normal. No staying at home. No masks. No more 1.5 metre bubble of personal space.
While the pandemic was a blissful break from the drain of human interaction, I can’t help but feel something has been lost. And with the lifting of lockdowns, the concept of personal space evaporated faster than hand sanny.
These feelings of frustration all aligned in a perfect moment at the airport.
Some things you need to know about me:
- I am always super aware of where I am and my proximity to other people, and
- I am overwhelmingly polite and try to not get in the way.
So I am always shocked when people don’t maintain personal space, stand in walkways, take up space they don’t need to at the detriment and inconvenience of those around them.
AKA everyone in the airport that day.
It was hectic. It was chaos. People standing in what were quite clearly thoroughfares. People queuing up so close I could feel them breathing on the back of my neck. An old dude walked into me. People watching YouTube/TikTok/video content out loud while walking around.
It was all a bit much.
What is personal space?
So when I had finally managed to carve out a little bit of calm in the boarding lounge — by creating an enforced personal space barrier with bags on the seats next to me and noise cancelling headphones on my head — a Tweet/Thread from David Farrier crystallised all these thoughts.
I started reading up on personal space and all roads led back to Princeton’s Professor Michael Graziano. He is the guy to talk to about personal space. He’s written books about it. He’s also thought a lot about human consciousness, and he’s a ventriloquist.
I ended up talking to Prof Graziano via video call in the early hours of my morning/his afternoon earlier this year as construction roared away in the office next to his. I told him my theory: covid has destroyed our ability to maintain appropriate personal space and that’s why I feel constantly on edge when out in public.
He told me maybe, and like a good scientist, needed more data.
“Studies of personal space before, during and after the pandemic would be really interesting just to see [if] there [is] an average change,” he said
“I’m positive that during the pandemic, most places had pretty radical changes… I certainly think personal space is like the lattice — the framework — of social interaction.
“And so when you screw it up, you cause a lot of disruption in how people even understand how to interact with each other. [Covid] must have had a hugely disruptive effect.
“It could well be that people are just now trying to readjust and, re-learning this unconscious dance of personal space.”
I asked if perhaps because of Covid, we’ve overcorrected. He asked me to think about what personal space actually is.
“It’s a protective space. It’s the space where you don’t want other people, right? And if you don’t practise it, then it’s not functional and you start doing weird things like crowding people. So maybe not so much an overcorrection as it is a loss of ability to even process personal space properly anymore.”
Yikes.
A social lattice
Integral to understanding personal space is Graziano’s idea of a “social lattice”.
At the simplest level, personal space gives you a physical spacing between people. This was originally studied in a bunch of animals, but the most charming, and easy to visualise, is birds on a wire.
Depending on the species of bird, the spacing between them will be bigger or smaller. They’re often lined up almost perfectly evenly, like they are actually government surveillance drones. They’re all doing the same little birdy space computation and they’re keeping that space between each bird.
All creatures that form social groups develop this kind of spacing. The result is almost like a honeycomb structure. Next time you’re in a room of people, take a look: there’s a natural spacing between everyone. When more people squeeze into a room, the natural spacing shrinks, but there is still space.
Even on the most crowded Tokyo subway, everyone recognises you’re going to be mooshed. But the parts of the body that touch other people are really restricted, like shoulders and the back but not your front. Certainly never your face1.
The crazy thing is that people just pick up on those cues without even knowing it. It’s part of how we read rooms and social situations, how we decide how to talk to someone, how polite to be, or how straightforward to be.
That’s the lattice: those really simple geometric rules of space between people.
“People mistakenly think of [personal space] as the space where you invite your friends in, but it’s not that. It’s the space that you exclude people from. It’s about protection.”
Graziano said the brain tools we use to figure out personal space are the same mechanisms — or at least they overlap with the mechanisms — you use to avoid bumping into things.
“A good example of this is when you see a wasp flying around the room. At first you’re a little nervous, but it’s way over there. As it gets closer, you get more anxious. So then you start doing this,” Graziano said as he started waving his hands around.
I wish I could do that when people crowd me.
This mechanism first evolved for protecting the body against objects, and was then co-opted for social purposes.
And generally we don’t want most people in that space. But it’s a complicated cortical calculation running all the time. There are many different inputs to the formula that shrinks and expands the lattice. Where you are, how you’re feeling, what is the thing coming toward you. Graziano tells me about a classic psychology experiment used to figure out personal space.
“You have a person standing in a room, and they think they’re waiting for the experiment to start, but actually this is the experiment.
“There’s a stranger in the room that’s walking a little closer, bit by bit. At some point the person takes a step away, and then you’re like, aha, that’s the distance!”
Big alpha male honchos suck
On average we all have a personal space of about a metre. As per above it’s dynamic, and women generally have larger personal space needs with men. Which is fair because violence against women is a very real problem everywhere. So dudes, remember to chill out and back off.
Big alpha male honchos will have a much smaller personal space because they’re less threatened by other people. They’ll signal dominance by interrupting others’ personal space.
“If you show you have small personal space and you don’t mind people getting close to you, then everyone else in the room gets a sort of subconscious feeling that, oh, he must be the alpha.”
Think of Donald Trump’s handshake. He grabs the hand and yanks the attached arm and body right in close. He’s signalling: look, I’m so unconcerned. I’m so powerful I don’t care who enters my personal space2.
For most people this is an unconscious process. The reflex to back away still has other factors and it’s not just as simple as a static shell around you.
There are, of course, people/things we let get close to us. Your intimate partner, children, pets, friends, people at music festivals. Your brain is running that computation but it’s not putting up a shell, it’s expanding and contracting a personal space forcefield.
“What you’re doing is shrinking the protected zone,” Graziano said. “Someone you’re vaguely familiar with can come maybe within a metre. You can interact with that person and you feel fine, but you don’t want them closer.
“The stimulus of that person is not strong enough to cause activation in that spatial protective mechanism as long as they’re a metre away.
“But then you talk to someone you’re much closer to emotionally and then you shrink your zone further. They can come even closer, but you have to know someone really well to shrink that zone into nothing.”
Why?
“At some point you have to shrink your protected zone down to zero. Otherwise there’d be no mating and no children.”
Ha. Fair. Think about the people who you’re intimate with. You probably let them touch all the delicate parts of your body. The bits a predator would strike for. When people get nervous they hunch, that’s to, as Wu Tang said, protect ya neck. By letting someone kiss your neck — with their teeth-filled mouth right next to your carotid artery sending all the oxygenated blood to your brain — is a powerful signal that you’re letting them in.
Even deeper in the calculation is a radar system that’s constantly keeping track of things that we might collide with and adjusting our emotions so we don’t bash into them.
And obviously, external things mess with this. Mobile phones. Alcohol. Being in an unfamiliar high-stress space (like an airport).
“Alcohol can give you liquid courage and lower your fears, inhibitions, and stresses, and then your personal space shrinks quite a bit so it’s probably much more comfortable to be in a big crowded place where people are packed around you and you’re drunk than it is when you’re not drunk.”
As someone who is 11 years sober, this struggle is real.
The lightbulb went off for me when Graziano said for large chunks of our day we’re not practising the social dance in the way our brains and bodies evolved for. It’s very hard in person, face to face with somebody, to get really insulting and in their face and aggressive. Here in the online space, there is no social lattice so all the rules and restrictions which are normally running on autopilot disappear and people become less restricted, less inhibited in some ways.
The thing Graziano said about the Tokyo subway stuck with me, as it was the closest example of my experience with the airport. We agreed that generally airports were spacious places where there was little to no need to touch or even get too close, and if my experience was anything to go by that suggests some kind of loss of natural personal space understanding or processing.
Is there any hope of people relearning personal space as a concept? Graziano was hopeful saying that while there are some factors like neurodiversity, recently experiencing trauma, brain injury from an accident, or damage to the inner ear which can mean people just don’t realise when they’re too close, respecting personal space is something that can be learned/relearned and that people — like me — who have a larger personal space needs should be proactive in reminding people who get in to back off.
He also offers me some advice about how best to soothe the rage when people won’t back off or are unable to.
“Just this knowledge itself may be helpful. The thing about tricking your personal space is always going to be relaxing yourself or making yourself less stressed and less fearful… you can do things to change your psychological state.”
The four Ps
Since I spoke to him, I have been trying to be more mindful of my own personal space but also with my own reactions when personal space gets invaded. These couple of pointers have really helped me quell my rage.
Prepare: make sure you’re in the right headspace before putting yourself in a situation where others might get close.
Perceive: watch other people to see if they’re likely to respect personal space (I’m looking at you big drunk dudes) and if you can’t move away…
Protect: politely remind people they are in your personal space and you don’t feel comfortable, they can’t relearn personal space if they’re not getting feedback. And for those of you who aren’t as highly strung as I, please…
Be polite: it doesn’t inconvenience you to be more spatially aware when out in public. It’s fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-far better to give people the space they need, after all you never know who is a psycho killer.
How are you all holding up out there? Was this helpful? Are you a personal space invader or do you hang back? Have any egregious examples of people getting up in your grill? Anyone got any theories why people now think it’s okay to listen to videos out loud in public places? I’ll be lurking around in my inbox if you want to reply.
Stay safe, stay sane
<3
JJW
PS: this was originally written for another publication but it has fallen through the gaps, so very pleased to get it out into the world.
PPS: more on the second week of Space School and the USA next week, once I’ve caught my breath a little bit.
- Across all of humanity that 1 metre of personal space is pretty constant. Different cultures don’t really have different personal space needs. ↩︎
- Which has its own Wikipedia page. Wtf? ↩︎