Now, here is where it starts to get really interesting. A lot, and maybe by far the greatest proportion of culture we acquire from others, we're not even aware of. It's like the air we breathe, it's all around us. If the air is the way it always is, we don't notice it. But we notice it if something is wrong. For example, if it doesn't smell right. And the same thing is true of culture. If something does not conform to the expectations we have, it can make us uncomfortable. One of these normally unconscious aspects of culture is how far away we stand from other people. The anthropologist Edward T Hall developed the study of spatial distances, which has become known to us today as Proxemics. Proxemics is the study of the amount of space people feel it necessary to keep between themselves. And let me emphasize that, feel it necessary to keep between themselves and other people. Based on observations of middle class Americans from the northeastern US, back in the early 1960s, Hall described four different zones of proximity between people, depending on the type of relationship between them. First is the intimate zone, which is generally between 0 and 18 inches. As Hall refers to it, this the space of quote, love making and wrestling, comforting and protecting. The second zone is the personal zone, and this tends to range for these northeastern Americans from 18 inches to about 4 feet. Hall refers to it as the protective bubble that people keep around themselves, and it's inside this bubble that they normally feel comfortable. Third, is the social zone. This is the distance from about 4 to 12 feet, and it's the zone of business interactions where one individual might, say, be behind a desk or a service counter. Lastly, at distances greater than 12 feet, is the public zone. This might be the distance, say, between someone giving a speech and the audience or between actors and audience during a play. What is interesting for us as anthropologists is that these distances vary based on your cultural upbringing. People from different parts of the world have different expectations about what distance is appropriate. Such distances are especially notable in conversations between people who have just met, or who do not know each other well. Well, I can recall vividly my first experience of differences in this regard. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest of the United States where people tended to feel comfortable with more distance between them than less when they were conversing. When I was still in high school, I picked up two hitchhikers. Now, I know you're not supposed to pick up hitchhikers, but then it wasn't as bad a thing as it is now. They turned out to have been college students from France traveling across the country. I was driving and one student was sitting in the front seat and the other in the backseat on the passenger side. Each time one of them spoke, he leaned over and got close to my face. For me, way too close to my face. I was starting to feel claustrophobic. I can remember pushing back toward the side of the door. I have noticed such differences many times in myself and others. Indeed, there's a kind of dance that ensues between people who have different spatial needs. If one finds the distance too close, he or she tends to back up. This makes the other feel the distance is too far, and so he or she moves forward, and actually literally take a step each way, and this causes the first one to move back, and so forth. So that one is actually capable of walking the other around the room. Maybe we should call it waltzing the other around the room. Cooperation on teams involves expectations of this sort, and when the expectations are violated, the performance of the team can suffer. In the next video, we'll talk a little bit more about the relationship between expectations and realities.
