DISTANCE MATTERS - PHYSICAL SPACE AND SOCIAL IMPACT

Studies of college students and citizens of south Florida, United Stat es, students in Shanghai, China, and an international sample of social psychologists show that social influence, measured by the frequency o f memorable interactions, is heavily determined by distance In all thr ee cases, although there was a great deal of interaction with distant persons, the relationship between distance and interaction frequency w as well described by an inverse power function with a slope of approxi mately-1, consistent with the expectation that social impact is propor tional to the inverse square of the distance separating two persons. T his result confirms one principle from Latane's 1981 theory of social impact and helps explain the ability of opinion minorities to cluster and survive in the face of majority influence.