The Effects of Interpersonal Distance and Orientation Upon the Perception of Social Relationships

Summary

In an experiment that examined the effects of interpersonal physical proximity and orientation upon observers' evaluative impressions of depicted diadic relationships, 240 male and female undergraduates viewed a group of silhouette drawings that depicted a series of social encounters involving two persons positioned according to five different body-to-body orientations and separated according to five different interpersonal distances. Ss rated each stimulus pair on a series of semantic differential scales and wrote brief descriptions of what activities they saw associated with each distance-orientation combination. An analysis of variance conducted upon Ss' evaluative ratings indicated that diadic relationships were seen as significantly less positive with increasing distance separating diad members and with less direct physical orientations being displayed. However, the occurrence of several significant interaction effects involving interpersonal distance, orientation, sex of Ss, and sex of diad members indicated that these effects were not simply additive. Under conditions of close physical proximity men and women attributed different activities to face-to-face and back-to-back orientations according to the sex composition of diads being judged.