Visual behavior and face-to-face distance during interaction.

Male subjects sat either 2312 feet or 6 feet from a male interviewer. Subjects seated at the closer distance were judged to spend less time gazing at the interviewer's eyes (p<.001)-a replication of a finding reported by Argyle and Dean. Evidence indicated that several factors which could have produced this effect if confounded with distance were not so confounded, and the difference kin visual behavior was attributed to the difference in distance. It was ,also found that, at both interaction distances, subjects with higher factor scores on a questionnaire factor thought to measure socioemotional evaluations of the interviewer were judged to spend more time gazing at his eyes (p<.05 for combined data). An experiment recently reported by Argyle and Dean (1965) suggests that the spacing of interacting individuals may influence their visual behavior. Subjects in this experiment, in accord with the researchers' theory of "intimacy," were judged to spend less time gazing at the eyes of a confederate when seated in closer proximity to the confederate. The present paper reports another examination of the effect of interaction distance on visual behavior, this one using an experimental procedure altered to minimize some difficulties in the interpretation of the data. In the present study, in contrast to Argyle and Dean's, the subject was assigned a task requiring very little cognitive activity. He was asked only to estimate his peers' opinions on various issues, and most subjects proved able to do this without hesitation for most of the issues. Thus it was unlikely that stimuli from the subject's coactor would disrupt the subject's performance of the task. And thus a confounding of interaction distance was unlikely in which the more numerous, more intense stimuli at the closer distance produce more