Distance matters more than you think! An artifact clouds interpretation ofLatane, Liu, Nowak, Bonevento, and Zheng's results

Latane, Liu, Nowak, Bonevento, and Zheng reported three surveys that led th em to conclude that the number of memorable interactions decreases as a fun ction of geographical distance raised to the first power?: Although interac tions certainly decayed with distance, the particular decay function that t hey report appears to be an artifact of their memorable-interactions-per-mi le measure. In effect, they took remembered interactions, divided them by d istance, and then plotted them against distance The fact that the inverse o f distance plotted against distance has a slope of -1.00 when plotted in lo garithms is tautological, not psychological Of course distance matters, but we need to look elsewhere to find out precisely how.