Yulia Fedenok, a specialist in human spatial behavior, talks about why people need individual space, why it’s hard to live in a communal apartment, and what happens when a person is deprived of privacy
Recorded by Tatyana Zarubina
Illustration from the atlas “La Clef des Champs” by Jacques Le Moine de Morgues. 1586 © The Trustees of the British Museum
Functions of individual space
Privacy is one part of a larger complex of human spatial behavior. Relationships between people are based on spatial behavior - both at the individual, group and intergroup levels: a person, like other animals, builds a space around himself, with the help of which he is separated from other individuals.
Research on this phenomenon in animals began in classical ethology. Classical ethology is the early period of development of ethology, centered on the work of the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz and the Dutch ornithologist Nicholas Tinbergen, who created the doctrine of the instinctive behavior of animals and its development. They focused their research on studying the behavior of animals in their natural habitat as an adaptation to the environment, back in the early twentieth century. And already in the middle of the last century, the American anthropologist Edward Hall was the first to study human spatial behavior. He studied, among other things, the features, functions and meaning of a person’s personal space, which he protects when communicating with another person.
The distance to which a person allows others to approach him is often represented by researchers as an air bubble that constantly changes its volume: a person allows someone closer to him, someone further. What is this personal space for? It has many functions: it is both a limitation of social and physical contacts, and a way to avoid stress during close contact. In general, maintaining individual space allows a person to regulate the quantity and quality of stimuli that people exchange. This is a form of non-verbal communication that regulates the degree of human freedom. Researchers have proposed various models to explain the functions of personal space. So, the equilibrium model This model was proposed in the work of psychologists Michael Argyle and Janet Dean “Eye-contact, distance and connection” (Argyle M., Dean J. Eye-contact, distance and affiliation. Sociometry, Vol. 28, Issue 3. 1965 ). assumes that each person has an optimal level of acceptable intimacy, according to which a person’s personal space is built (including the distance to which he allows other people), and the Evans and Howard model Gary Evans and Roger Howard “Personal Space” ( Evans GW, Howerd RB Personal Space. Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 80 (4), 1973). explains personal space as a mechanism that was formed in the process of evolution to control intraspecific aggression. In the 1960s and 70s, the concept of privacy was formed as selective control of access to oneself: a person, in the process of communication, subconsciously evaluates how open he can be to his interlocutor.
Illustration from the atlas “La Clef des Champs” by Jacques Le Moine de Morgues. 1586 © The Trustees of the British Museum
Kinds
What are a person’s personal boundaries? Psychologists divide them into two main types:
- Weak. Such boundaries can be easily violated. Moreover, they are encroached upon by both well-known people and strangers. If a person cannot convey to the interlocutor how he should be treated, then the opponent will act as he sees fit. Weak personal boundaries are characteristic of weak people with low self-esteem and a depressed sense of will. Such persons will not defend their rights, and will always stay away from anything serious, considering themselves simply unworthy of any feats. Such people are kind-hearted and love to help others. A person with weak personal boundaries will engage in charity, and will agree to give away his last things to please another, more needy person.
- Strong boundaries. Persons who can stand up for themselves and will not give others the opportunity to infringe on their interests will build invisible walls around themselves, which will be difficult for not only a stranger, but even a well-known person to break through. From the outside, such individuals may seem too cold and unyielding. Their self-confidence and leadership qualities are visible to the naked eye. If someone decides to encroach on a person’s personal boundaries, then this someone will receive a rebuff and will no longer want to encroach on what the person so fiercely guards. Some may think that such people are lonely. But there is nothing like this in their life. People simply demand respect not only at work, but also at home. All household members know the limit of a person’s patience and will not cross it. Children who grow up in the family of a person who knows the boundaries of what is permitted will unconsciously adopt such a system of protecting their personality.
Communication distance
Human spatial behavior is divided into two levels. The first is personal space, that is, first of all, the communication distance, the distance to which one person is physically ready to allow another to approach him. The degree of openness is selective, and is influenced by factors such as the closeness of the communication partners’ relationship, their gender, age, ethnicity and culture, and status.
This is not only observed in humans. Thus, ethologists have noted that in birds and mammals, females communicate with each other at a shorter distance than males. This is due to a greater degree of dominance and aggression in the latter. The same thing can be seen in people, and at a cross-cultural level: women are closer to each other when communicating than men, and this is observed in different cultures. Partners in mixed-sex couples communicate slightly further than women, but closer than men (except when people of the opposite sex are in intimate relationships). But this principle does not work for children. Teenagers communicate more closely in mixed pairs, since at this age there is great interest between the sexes.
The need for individual space changes with age. When a child is born, he is not separated from his mother. He is constantly carried with him, that is, he has no individual space at all. As the child grows older, he begins to assert his privacy. It has been noticed that around the age of four, children already begin to have conflicts with their parents over space. By the age of eight or nine, gender differences appear: boys require more space than girls at a fairly early age. The increase in the size of the space around oneself continues on average until the age of 16, when a person is completely socialized in his culture and, in general, his body growth ends. It is at this age that personal space is compared with adults, and then, if a person lives in a stable environment, without serious shocks, his personal space does not change.
The naked eye can see that the communication distance varies from culture to culture. Therefore, people often experience discomfort when communicating with representatives of another culture. This is what often causes negative attitudes towards migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
At first glance, it seems that all people living in the south communicate over shorter distances than those living in the north. Anthropologist Edward Hall once divided cultures into contact and non-contact cultures. The first are characterized by a very close communication distance, and at the same time everyone touches each other, looks into each other’s eyes, and breathes on each other. The latter do the opposite. But further research showed that this is a very arbitrary division. For example, Italians are very sociable: they speak loudly, gesticulate a lot, touch each other, look into each other’s eyes - but at the same time they communicate at a fairly large distance. The British communicate at a shorter distance than the Italians, but they are less contactable. The Japanese, on the contrary, do not touch each other, speak quietly, without looking at the interlocutor, but their communication distance is minimal. In Russia, the communication distance is average, about 40 centimeters, but at the same time we touch each other little and look at each other a lot. In addition, there are also subcultural differences. For example, there is a difference between a city and a village: in the village people demand more space for themselves than in the city.
Illustration from the atlas “La Clef des Champs” by Jacques Le Moine de Morgues. 1586 © The Trustees of the British Museum
Outside or inside?
Carl Gustav Jung established that psychic energy can be directed either outward (extraversion) or inward (introversion).
An extrovert is a sociable person who likes to be around a lot of people and communicate with them. It is difficult for him to be aloof from events. If some social group does not accept him, he becomes sad and feels left out. An introvert is reserved, keeps his distance, tightly controls his emotions, and does not have too many friends. In social contacts, he gives preference to their quality rather than quantity. Prefers to write and read more than to talk. And also strives to visit calmer and quieter places.
An introvert thinks about an extrovert that he is too nosy and annoying. The extrovert, in turn, considers the introvert cold, patronizing, pompous, or even labels them as ill-wishers. Mutual understanding between them is possible when the extrovert can make sure that when communicating at a distance, the introvert does not have any hostility towards him. At the same time, the introvert may be more relaxed about the fact that the extrovert is gesticulating here and there, and will stop viewing this as an attack on his own intimate area.
(c) Unsplash.com
Allocation of family territory
The second level of spatial behavior is the desire to limit some territory (personal space), claim exclusive rights to it, retire there and independently control who is allowed there.
If animals mark territory with smell or claws, then in humans, symbols most often act as such marks, such as, for example, fences or even flags at the state level. For this purpose, people create various barriers separating their personal territory. There is always some kind of demarcation between the buyer and the seller, the meaning of which is precisely to allocate their personal territory so that no one intrudes into it. In private life, the idea of privacy is manifested in the same symbolic delimitation of territory: here is my wall, my photographs hang on it, my things are scattered here, and my figurines are placed here - that means this is mine.
Territorial space is divided into three more levels: personal, group and public (public). The first level is personal space inside your own home. The main function of this space is protection from the intrusion of others. Next comes the space that a person shares with his close relatives. This is what privacy theory addresses. The third level is the space that the individual shares with all other people in social life.
Human spatial behavior is partly innate and partly culturally determined. We understand this by observing similar behavior in social animal species (which includes humans) and by studying human behavior in different cultures. All animals have a need to limit and mark their territory, and social animals have a need for the territory assigned to their group.
Illustration from the atlas “La Clef des Champs” by Jacques Le Moine de Morgues. 1586 © The Trustees of the British Museum
Greetings from distant ancestors
So, sit back, sit back: today there’s a serious longread on samorazwitie.ru. Fear not: “serious” does not mean “boring.”
Animals have instinctively fixed patterns of behavior aimed at protecting the territory. Lorenz and Tinbergen (N. Tinbergen, “Social behavior of animals”, 1993; K. Lorenz, “Aggression (so-called evil)”, 1994) write that the boundaries of this habitat are determined by evolutionary necessity: an individual occupies an area capable of feeding it and give her shelter.
If a stranger enters an occupied area, he will be met with aggression. Only a potential sexual partner should expect a warm welcome.
Once upon a time, man was also a territorial creature. In a sense, it remains so to this day - adjusted for control by complex mental functions.
A very young child does not seek to isolate himself from strangers, but already at the age of three, children begin to become self-aware and demonstrate the need for privacy. Further more.
Teenagers (see the link for an article on the characteristics of adolescence), with their desire to defend the “I,” react painfully to almost any intrusion into their personal zone. They suddenly have a bunch of secret things. The guys strive to arrange, if not the room, then at least their own corner, strictly according to their own taste. An attempt by an adult to talk frankly about intimate topics can be met with outright insults.
With age and the achievement of personal maturity, people learn to limit themselves in expressing negative emotions when persistently invading the space of privacy, but do not stop experiencing them.
Privacy history
Despite the existence of natural mechanisms that dictate human territorial behavior, the idea of solitude and privacy is largely a product of culture. It arises only in the modern era, at the end of the 17th - beginning of the 18th centuries, and even then only in an urban environment: in the villages they did not think about it. The single-room dwelling has been the most common type of housing for many centuries because it is the easiest to heat. Even in large medieval castles, everyone slept in one large hall: it was cold, the rooms were poorly heated, and everyone had to sleep in the same room to keep warm. So, until there was accessible heating, there was no talk of any privacy. Only central heating in cities made it possible to increase the number of rooms, which gradually began to be perceived as the norm and led to the idea of the need to retire and have a private space.
In general, the level of privacy depends on status - the higher it is, the more space a person has. But there are also exceptions, when a high-status person does not have much personal space. If we, for example, remember the French kings, we will see that they did not even go to bed alone; servants always remained nearby. Noble children of the 19th century in Russia slept in tiny rooms with nannies. They were not given personal space because the child was not perceived as a person at all.
Modern European privacy requirements, where everyone needs a separate room of at least 20 square meters, appeared in the 1950s, in the post-war era, and even then not everywhere.
Cultural norm
Now in Russia and in Western countries, people on average have much more personal territory than they did 50 years ago. First of all, this is due to a fairly high standard of living: we can afford large areas of housing. Here, a person’s social status, his economic opportunities and cultural image still have a significant influence: a modern person strives to have a separate room for each family member, since the idea of privacy has been ingrained in him since childhood.
When people were moved to Khrushchev-era apartment buildings in the 1960s, it was happiness for them. Very little time has passed, and everyone is already unhappy with such housing - Khrushchev is perceived as something very bad. The reason is that the cultural norm has changed. I studied how teenagers imagine the ideal home. Usually these are two- and three-story houses, with a swimming pool and a garage - a picture of a beautiful life that can be seen in the movies. I asked older people born in the 1920s and 30s about the same thing. They all answered that they had never thought about anything like that at all, because they believed that they would always live in houses of eight square meters, and this seemed normal to them. Everyone lived like this, and if a person grew up like this, it’s natural for him. No one felt any embarrassment because everyone had to live together: with brothers, sisters, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. Almost until the middle of the twentieth century, no one even thought of hanging curtains over the bed: there was no expectation of privacy within the family.
Illustration from the atlas “La Clef des Champs” by Jacques Le Moine de Morgues. 1586 © The Trustees of the British Museum
What are personal boundaries and why do people need them?
Personal boundaries are a conditional concept that denotes a certain line between the worldview of an individual and the attitudes and intentions of the people around her. Some build five-meter stone fences with guards on towers, while others have no boundaries at all.
How many people do you know who protect their inner world from intrusion by outsiders? Are you one yourself?
Think about whether you always do what you want or are you trying to please someone?! Do you make decisions yourself in certain situations that concern you, or do you rely on the opinions of strangers? In general, how often do you say “YES”, while at the same time feeling the desire to refuse? If you have friends who use you as a “drain barrel” and they don’t care if you are interested in their information?
If all of the above is normal and commonplace in your life, then this is clearly a gross violation of personal boundaries.
What do you pay for lack of personal boundaries? First of all, your mental balance is disturbed. A person experiences constant discomfort, his mood deteriorates and there is a feeling as if all his strength has left you.
First of all, a colossal amount of energy is spent on maintaining relationships with others. You allow yourself to be manipulated, and you don’t like it, but you remain silent. For example, you work for someone. It is unlikely that you will experience love and satisfaction; rather, you will realize that you are being taken advantage of.
Some people believe that this only happens to those who have a bad environment. Allegedly, a good friend will not use it for personal gain. This is a deep misconception. Your personal boundary is only your task, and you need to learn how to build it. Otherwise, people will sit on your neck.
Private family life
This persists in many places - for example, in Japan, in Arab and African countries there is still no talk of any individual privacy. But it is very important to understand that this refers to the lack of privacy within the family, among close relatives. It’s a completely different matter if you have to live among strangers, then this almost always causes serious stress.
In a traditional family, intra-family etiquette is formed, which is one of the ways to regulate the interaction of people in a private space - certain norms of behavior, mechanisms for privacy, stress relief and conflict resolution are developed. All this helps members of society to coexist with each other. When a woman gets married and moves to a new family, certain rules of etiquette help her build new relationships: she already more or less knows how to behave and accepts a certain social role in this family.
If we are talking about communal apartments, then there is no question of any etiquette here. A lot of people move from region to region, and they are forced to live with a large number of strangers: 10–20 families or more could live in a communal apartment, and at least three people in each family. In such a situation, general norms of behavior are not formed and conflicts arise. Their main reason is the division of territory: bathroom, toilet, kitchen.
At the same time, people have practically no opportunity not only to have complete privacy, but also to be alone with their family. As a result, complete strangers know what you eat, what you wash, what your daily routine is and when you go to the restroom. At the same time, even an animal will not demonstrate to others that it is eating something tasty, because the food can be taken away - hiding important life events is associated with competition. As a result, in a communal apartment a person has to constantly protect his privacy and the life of his family, and this often causes great stress.
Illustration from the atlas “La Clef des Champs” by Jacques Le Moine de Morgues. 1586 © The Trustees of the British Museum
What does the personal reserve area include?
The personal zone is, first of all, the body . When someone else gets too close to you, your brain signals: “Attention, maximum danger!” The signal is amplified when it comes to touch.
The next most important component of individual comfort is the territory that you regard as your own and safe. It can be not only an apartment, but also a temporary place in the sun - for example, a bunk in a train carriage.
Imagine that you are traveling on the bottom bunk, have already laid out your laundry, and suddenly another passenger enters the compartment. How will you feel when he sits next to you, occupying half of the already inhabited bed? Exactly.
An interesting case is personal space at work. In a cramped shared office, everyone defends their desk to the best of their ability. The traditional way to mark a place is to use markers. I don’t mean a variety of stationery, but any atypical little things - framed family photographs, decorative figures, original pencil holders.
Personal items that are especially - whether on an office desk or at home - play the role of an independent component of a private zone. These things are especially common:
- souvenirs that remind you of something important;
- jewelry (they are perceived almost as part of one’s appearance);
- objects that provide familiar everyday pleasures - a favorite chair, your own mug;
- knife, gun and other means of self-defense.
Inviolable values also include purely psychological phenomena - attitudes, habits, tastes .
Let's say a child who is forced to eat his unloved rice porridge instead of his favorite oatmeal feels deeply hurt. His sensations will be similar to those that arise in an adult in response to a familiar pat on the shoulder.
Consequences of privacy deprivation
How people who are among strangers are affected by the inability to be alone is shown by studies conducted on prisoners. In prison, this is perceived extremely painfully, as a loss of humanity: everything is taken away from a person, including the right to own his body, not to mention the right to his own territory. This causes enormous stress and, as a result, an increase in aggressiveness. First, the level of stress hormones increases. A person needs psychophysical and emotional release, which most often does not happen, and this results in conflicts over territory and personal space. Everyone tries to push other people away from themselves, thereby increasing their space and relieving tension.
In conditions of great crowding due to the constant violation of personal space, aggressiveness always increases. Approximately the same thing happened in communal apartments, where people had to live side by side with other families alien to each other.
Yulia Fedenok is a Candidate of Historical Sciences, a research fellow in the sector of cross-cultural psychology and human ethology at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She studies spatial and territorial human behavior; she wrote her PhD thesis on the topic “Spatial behavior of children and adolescents in multiethnic groups.”
Attention, proximity
No matter how paradoxical it may be, personal space is most often violated by the closest people: relatives, friends, loved ones. And we forgive them for this and sometimes even encourage them, for example, during sexual contact.
But the invasion of our intimate zone by strangers - in addition to emotional rejection - also causes physiological changes in the body. The heart begins to beat faster, adrenaline goes off scale, and blood flows into the muscles and brain in a powerful flow. That is, despite our will, the body prepares for a potential fight or flight. Therefore, you should not hug or touch people you don’t know, even if you really like them. These actions can make them feel negative towards you. The conclusion suggests itself: when communicating, you should always keep your distance.
How to assert your personal boundaries
What to do about this, and who is to blame? No one is to blame for this, let's replace the word “guilt” with the word “responsibility” and start with ourselves... Maybe it’s time to start independent development and self-knowledge? By studying, changing, improving ourselves and our ideas about the world, we can change the world for the better and see its possibilities differently, from a new height, in a new quality. See in such detail that the reasons for such violations of personal boundaries will become transparent and obvious, and, therefore, methods for solving these problems will no longer be difficult.
It all starts with elementary child and developmental psychology: our parents and close circle teach us how to learn to identify our personal boundaries. At the stage of separation from parents, the child gradually gains independence and learns to take the first steps, balance his wants and cans, balance between can and musts, monitor the consequences of certain actions and gain his own unique experience.
What if your parents didn't have enough experience to teach you how to properly set personal boundaries? What if you were overprotected and/or not given enough support and care to make you feel confident enough to successfully navigate these developmental milestones? Then, from childhood, you will get used to depending on others, and what you will be inherited as a family experience growing up will contain “codes of parental trauma.” This is usually what happens, which is why they say “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Most of your actions in adulthood also remain dependent on the outside world, and similar to the dependencies and habits of your parents.
This happens until you yourself have learned to work correctly with personal boundaries.
Creating personal boundaries, aligning personal boundaries, protecting personal boundaries are elements of interaction and communication with the outside world. Understanding the principles of the world order, its energetic foundations and cosmic laws gives you a chance to see what is happening impartially and get out of the vicious circle of “template reactions” and techniques of “normal” communication to the level of real freedom of action and independence from external attempts to manipulate your borders.
Psychological methods of protection are only the first step towards studying and correctly forming a person’s personal boundaries, and at the next stage the formation of energy boundaries begins, personal strength is acquired, and the individual characteristics of your Soul evolution are clarified, which are decisive for interaction with the world of energies. All the diversity of your painful experience of violations of personal boundaries, as a rule, has its own energy-informational reasons, which are hidden in the subconscious and/or blocked in the body. We will study various practices and methods of understanding the mechanisms of functioning of the psychological and energetic foundations of the formation of personal boundaries in a new lesson on the development of awareness.
