Personal Space Is a Fear Response

http://nautil.us/blog/personal-space-is-a-fear-response

by dnetesn • 10 years ago

34 72 10 years ago

lr4444lr• 10 years ago

Why the assumption that it's always fear-based? Personal space boundaries are also cues to kinship ties, and sexual willingness. To my understanding, this is observed even in much of the animal kingdom.

DominikR4• 10 years ago

Exactly, I'm not afraid of something when I feel that some woman enters my personal space against my will. I'm just not interested.

I'm also not afraid of the colleague entering my personal space, I'm just not interested in friendship with that particular person.

Jtsummers5• 10 years ago

I find language interesting. The word "afraid" suggests some conscious level understanding of the fear you're feeling. A fear response doesn't require you to be conscious of it.

When someone stands too close behind me, particularly if it's unexpected or a stranger, while I'm not afraid (I am not concerned about being assaulted in any form), my body still tenses up. That's a fear response.

Something comes quickly at you, seen in your peripheral vision, you react by flinching, perhaps some adrenaline. A fear response, it may cause an emotional response of fear, or it may not. But it creates the physiological response to it.

miguelrochefort8• 10 years ago

This has been said over and over and over again. Privacy is irrational, a response to fear.

Why model a future after a fear?

DominikR4• 10 years ago

Then you are probably one of the very few persons that considers it normal to copulate regularly in the public.

miguelrochefort8• 10 years ago

All animals, except humans, do.

tbrownaw5• 10 years ago

...is irrational, a response to fear.

You do realize that fear isn't always (or even usually) irrational, right?

miguelrochefort8• 10 years ago

I do realize that.

What if a person is afraid of guns. Would the solution be for the government to subsidize body armors?

jnbiche3• 10 years ago

Then I'm sure you'll be happy to post your tax returns here, right?

miguelrochefort8• 10 years ago

I don't have tax returns.

AlexandrB2• 10 years ago

Privacy is about control of personal information - who get's to see what.

I think we should model a future where individuals are empowered to control their lives and their information instead of ceding control to governments and corporations.

miguelrochefort8• 10 years ago

Are you suggesting people should own information? That seems backward at best.

taneq• 10 years ago

The fact that fear is the response to a perceived invasion of personal space doesn't mean that your perception of personal space is a fear response.

You can't just lump things into two categories: https://youtu.be/bXKvRNnXF3A

je-so• 10 years ago

Personal space is a natural right!

Even animals has this right except farm animals.

arpa10• 10 years ago

Wait, how exactly perception of "personal space" is a response; secondly, please drop the pretense that "fear is bad, mkay". It is perfectly fine to feel fear when a red hot poker enters your personal space (i.e. it can harm you). There's nothing to be fixed here, system self-preservation subroutines work just fine, thank you.

Oh, and, edit, just because amygdala is partial to fear responses, it doesn't make all the actions that it takes part in "fear". It controls a lot of other functions, such as pleasure, sexual behavior, aggression, memory consolidation; not to mention that a lot of information passes through it both into the brain and out of it. Please, age of phrenology is over. It's not coming back. Human brain and human behavior is not "black and white" anymore, it's never going to be. It's a complex system of neuron junctions and pathways some of which are more specialized than others, sure, but, to reiterate, the incredible malleability and the sheer number of connections in human brain make neuroscientists even doubt the necessity of well established "centers" such as Broca's area. God. Damn. It.

0xcde4c3db• 10 years ago

Oh, and, edit, just because amygdala is partial to fear responses, it doesn't make all the actions that it takes part in "fear".

Yeah; this article (or at least the headline) seems to be engaging in the reverse inference fallacy [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_...

hodwik3• 10 years ago

Someone took the article personally.

arpa10• 10 years ago

I like my personal space, and, well, since the article violated my perceived personal belief space, of course, flight-or-fight response was triggered; you can see the outcome pretty clear I suppose. It was not "fear".

gdy• 10 years ago

What is wrong with that?

jerf• 10 years ago

The article happens to pattern match a current politically-charged argument in which opposition to some particular position is labeled as coming from fear, which is labeled a -phobia, which is therefore labeled as being irrational and whoever has it is mentally ill. Unsurprisingly, people rarely respond to this by saying "Oh, yes, you are correct, you have cogently shown me I am mentally ill, thank you so much for pointing this out!" and instead develop a rather hostile response to anything that even smells like the argument.

I actually somewhat carefully read the article to see if it ever suggested that fear in response to personal space violation was bad, and I don't think it did. I do think that it poorly supported its case, as a couple of other people are arguing, because just because certain activations look the same doesn't mean they are the same, but it never claimed this was a bad response.

Personally, based on how it feels from the inside, I can well believe that personal space is related to fear, and may activate some of the same circuits as fear, but that it "is" a fear is going beyond the evidence. Especially given the overloading of the word "fear". I am "afraid" of touching a hot oven, but I'm not running around in constant fear. It's a perfectly rational, controlled, situational "fear", not "a fear". Personal space violations strike me as rather more like the rational, controlled, situational case even if we are going to call that a "fear" response, which is perfectly fine scientifically, but serializes into conventional English poorly.

mcguire3• 10 years ago

This seems to be a spectacular Rorschach test.

DominikR4• 10 years ago

Actually it looks to me as if you are the one that took the parents response personally.

The parent gave a few arguments why he/she dislikes the article (if they are valid or not is another question), that's something you did not do.

Neither did you engage in any follow up comments to yours.

laotzu6• 10 years ago

Human brain and human behavior is not "black and white" anymore, it's never going to be. It's a complex system of neuron junctions

Aren't those neurons fundamentally firing on and off, like that of a binary system? On and off is analogous to "black and white"

JoeAltmaier2• 10 years ago

Oh no! Not at all. They modulate amplitude, frequency, phase. They have recharge times and duty cycles and limits and hysteresis. Each neuron is like some FM radio station. Not remotely like binary.

tbrownaw5• 10 years ago

Sure, just like your computer monitor is only ever solid black or solid white because the picture is made of binary bits.

Eric_WVGG2• 10 years ago

Why are so many of the commenters on this page acting as if they were personally attacked? Nowhere in the article are "fear responses" described as bad or unusual.

The knee-jerk hostility and lack of any sense of irony is quite telling.

arpa10• 10 years ago

Please point me to the articles' irony. It's easy to miss in that mess.

splawn• 10 years ago

I think they are referring to irony found in some of the reactions to the article not the article content.

I have never really thought about personal space being a fear response before. I always just thought I hated other people breathing on me.

Eric_WVGG2• 10 years ago

Histrionic knee-jerks reactions are a common response to fear. Numerous people here are simultaneously announcing that they are protective of their personal space, and lashing out at the article -- one person even admitted that it triggered his "flight or fight" response. All of this is anecdotal proof of the thesis.

(Just as an additional anecdote of the flip side of this, I have no personal space issues -- I like crowds and subways -- and have somewhat reckless tendencies)

mcguire3• 10 years ago

The irony is in the comments here. Most people are bad at recognizing the irony in their own responses.

Personally, since personal space is known to be very culturally specific, I'd like to see if the physiological responses they measured similarly differ by culture. (They may not be measuring personal space phenomena at all.)

laotzu6• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the JFK quote "We have nothing to fear except fear itself"

DrScump• 10 years ago

Was that before or after he invented the Internet?

(I think the initials you were looking for there were FDR)

laotzu6• 10 years ago

Marshall McLuhan has an alternate but related theory for the difference between "close talkers" and those who like to be able to see the whole person when talking.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan infers that "close talkers" are often tribal cultures who rely primarily on the spoken word for means of communication whereas highly literate cultures like to be able to see the whole person because of the stress the print medium has on the eye.

Personal Space Is a Fear Response

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