Es. Knowles, Distance matters more than you think! An artifact clouds interpretation ofLatane, Liu, Nowak, Bonevento, and Zheng's results, PERS SOC PS, 25(8), 1999, pp. 1045-1048
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.