America’s National Public Radio (NPR) is running a story on SL called Don’t Stand So Close to Me. It looks specifically at the issue of personal space in SL and there’s some interesting, if not surprising results:
1. Male avatars tend to keep more distance from each other than when interacting with a female avatar
2. That there’s a natural tendency for users of SL to maintain real-life personal space boundaries
3. That the level of eye contact is intrinsically linked to personal space
The premise is that these issues are both hard-wired and ingrained in our real-life social behaviour that they naturally flow over to SL. As the social behaviour expert says in the interview – we’re not as free as we moght think we are in a virtual world. It’s also another example of how SL provides ample opportunity for human behaviour research.
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