
A rendition of American sociologists James Dabbs and Neil Stokes early 1970s sidewalk study, wherein by measuring changes in personal space around people as they walked against passerbyers on sidewalks, which found that beautiful women were allotted more personal space measured in inches. [3]

A rendition of American sociologists James Dabbs and Neil Stokes early 1970s sidewalk study, wherein by measuring changes in personal space around people as they walked against passerbyers on sidewalks, which found that beautiful women were allotted more personal space measured in inches. [3]

In hmolscience, a study (TR:1387), “scientific study” or “psychological study”, similar to “experiment” (e.g. Libet experiment), tends to refer to a designed human reaction scenario, observation of behavior change per variable change, data collection methodology (volume, time, work, energy, attraction or repulsion, etc.), or measurement of phenomena, etc., with the overarching to aim bring elucidation to some problem, puzzle, or unclarified facet of nature, animal or human. Some noted hmolscience studies are listed below, two of which, the hallway study (c.1994) and the sidewalk study (date) are of great importance, being that they were social volume change studies, i.e. acquiring dating on changes in volume, a key variable of thermodynamics.

Sidewalk study | Volume

See main: Sidewalk study

In the early 1970s, American sociologists James Dabbs and Neil Stokes conducted a study, the research of which supported by a US Public Health grant (HH20660), involving three experiments, in an attempt to discern changes in personal space (volume around a person) with respect to beauty, when a person is in motion, in an attempt to bring quantification to the famous idiom “beauty is power”, the abstract of the results of this study, published in 1975 as “Beauty is Power: the Use of Space on the Sidewalk”, is the following: [3]

“In three experiments, 470 pedestrians were observed as they walked past confederates standing on the edge of a sidewalk. Observations were made from a window overlooking the area, using time lapse filming with a movie camera. Pedestrians were observed as they moved along the sidewalk, and their distances from the edge of the sidewalk was measured at several points. Pedestrians deviated in their paths to stay farther from a male than a female, father from two people than from one person, and farther from a beautiful than an unattractive woman. Sex, number, and attractiveness may be regarded as aspects of power, which serve to dominate various amounts of a space.”

This study, along with the similar 1974 study “Body Height, Position, and Sex as Determinants of Personal Space”, conducted on 41 males and 43 females, in a laboratory setting by American psychologists Johan Hartnett, Kent Vailey, and Craig Hartley, were in combination summarized by American beauty researcher Nancy Etcoff (1999), as follows: [4]

“As we walk down the street, we negotiate space with other people. We carry a small territory with us, a protected turf that surrounds us whether we are sitting or standing, and upon which others cannot trespass without permission. Move in too close, and people get uncomfortable. Tall people have bigger territories: their sheer size intimidates people. When people are asked to approach a stranger and stop when they no longer feel comfortable, they will stop about two feet away from a tall person (22.7 inches to be exact) but less than a foot (9.8 inches) from a short person. Very attractive people of any size are given personal territories; they carry their privileges around their persons.”

This "trespass without permission" brings to mind both the 1970 chimpanzee war and the 2001 9/11 attacks, both the result "territory trespassing" repercussions, a led into the topic of war thermodynamics.


A social volume change, i.e. piston and cylinder style "system" labeled, depiction of the hall scene from the 2004 Mean Girls (see: Mean Girls debate), where the alpha female (alpha molecule) “queen bee” Regina George α (Rachel McAdams), in pink, causes a volume expansion: students reactively move away giving her more personal space; a natural phenomenon verified and measured by sociologists and psychologists in various studies.

A social volume change, i.e. piston and cylinder style "system" labeled, depiction of the hall scene from the 2004 Mean Girls (see: Mean Girls debate), where the alpha female (alpha molecule) “queen bee” Regina George α (Rachel McAdams), in pink, causes a volume expansion: students reactively move away giving her more personal space; a natural phenomenon verified and measured by sociologists and psychologists in various studies.

Hallway study | Volume

See main: Hallway study: See also: Mean girls debate

In circa 1994, the so-called “hallway study”, a two part experiment, was conducted by American psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan, on male students students, who were classified according to whether they were northern or southern students. [1]

In the first experiment, students were brought into their lab with the overt purpose to fill out some questionnaire, after which they were instructed to take their form to a table at the end of a long, narrow hallway, along the way passing a man—a confederate of the experiment—standing in the hallway working in a file cabinet. After dropping of the completed form on the table, upon return down the hallway, the man would slam the file cabinet drawer shut, bump into the student’s shoulder, and call the student an “a**hole”. On average, southern students responded to the incident with more anger and less amusement than northern students, as assessed by independent observers positioned in the hallway, and secondly, according to saliva samples collected before and after the experiment, southerners exhibited greater increases in their levels of both cortisol, a stress, anxiety and arousal hormone, and testosterone.

In the second part of the experiment, Cohen and Nisbett arranged for an experimental game of chicken, in which, after being insulted (or not), the students encountered a second confederate, a six-foot-three-inch, 250-pound man walking quickly down the hall, in which the middle point of was lined with tables and thus too narrow for both to pass, meaning someone had to give way. The experiment found, via experimental measurement of the distance at which the subjects gave way to the big man, that the insulted southerners, on average, gave way to the approaching confederate when he was 37-inches away, whereas the non-insulted southerners gave way, on average, at 108-inches. The insult had no effect on the northerner’s chicken point; the non-insulted northerners typically gave way at about 75-inches. These results are summarized below:

Chicken point
(insulted)
Chicken point
(non-insulted)
Southerners
37-inches 108-inches
Northerners
75-inches 75-inches

	Chicken point (insulted)	Chicken point (non-insulted)
Southerners	37-inches	108-inches
Northerners	75-inches	75-inches

Experimenters found, also, that the non-insulted southerners were more polite than the northerners. Greene correlates this data the premise that different "herders", as he calls them, will spend more or less "time and energy" defending and or standing their "ground" (territory, volume, or personal space).


One of Belgian complexity theorist Jean Deneubourg's 1989 ant nest, food, bridge studies, similar to his circa 1983 lazy ant study or experiment. [6]

One of Belgian complexity theorist Jean Deneubourg's 1989 ant nest, food, bridge studies, similar to his circa 1983 lazy ant study or experiment. [6]

Lazy ant study | Work

See main: Lazy ant study

In the 1980s, Belgian complexity theorist Jean Deneubourg conducted a number of experiments on ants, in which a nest was placed in one pan, which was connected to another pan that had food, via a bridge; the ants were then allowed to form their “working” community, some staying near the nest doing little work, deemed “lazy”, others travelling out across the bridge to get food, deemed “hard working”. The “system” was then shattered by separating the two groups, lazy and hardworking, and placing them, respectively, into two new communities, according to which, it was curiously found that a significant percentage of the ‘lazy’ ants suddenly turned into hard working ants. [5]

Sweaty T-shirt study | Bonding

See main: Sweaty T-shirt study

In 1995, Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind conducted an experiment, based on the 1970s major histocompatiblity (MHC) matching findings in animals, in which he had a group of female college students smell odorous T-shirts that had been worn by male students for three nights, without deodorant, cologne or scented soaps, finding that, overwhelmingly, the women preferred the odors of men with the most dissimilar MHCs to their own, implying that they were most sexually attracted, via scent, to men whose immune system genome was most dissimilar to their own.

Marital interaction study | Bond
In the 1970s, American mathematical psychologist John Gottman conducted a study wherein he put several hundred married couples in a room and videotaped their interactions, at the micro-movement level, then correlated these to patters of divorce years later, finding that stable long-term marriages have a 5-to-1 ratio (see: Gottman stability ratio) of attraction to repulsion in the exchange force of their bond. [2]

Heat of the moment | Study

See main: Hot-cold empathy gap

(add overview)

Determinism study
In 2007, Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe conducted a determinism-themed morality study, in which, firstly, the presented people with the following so-called Laplacian universe (see: Laplace’s demon): [7]

“Imagine a universe (Universe A) in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it. This is true form the very beginning of the universe, so what happened in the beginning of the universe caused what happened next, and so on right up until the present. For example one day John decided to have French Fries at lunch. Like everything else, this decision was completely caused by what happened before it. So, if everything in this universe was exactly the same up until John made his decision, then it had to happen that John decided to have French Fries.”

Nichols and Knobe then asked subjects, after reading this, whether people in this universe are fully morally responsible for their actions. Fewer than 5 percent of the respondents said yes.

In the second part of the experiment, a different group of subjects read the same description of Universe A, but instead of responding to a general question about responsibility in this universe, they got the following question:

“In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and 3 children. He knows that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns the house and kills his family.”

Here, 72 percent of respondents said that Bill is fully morally responsible for his actions. [8]

Other
In 2009, Hans Ijzerman conducted a study in which he varied the temperature of a room, between two groups of students, and obtained their measures of social proximity via the use of thermal word descriptions.

References
1. (a) Cohen, Dov and Nisbett, Richard E. (1994). “Self-Protection and the Culture of Honor: Explaining Southern Violence” (abs) (pdf), Personality and Social Psychology, 85(5):808.
(b) Nisbett, Richard E. and Cohen, Dov, (1996). Culture of Honor: the Psychology of Violence in the South. Westview Press.
(c) Greene, Joshua. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (hallway study, pgs. 76-78). Penguin.
2. (a) Gottman, John. (1994). Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. New York: Fireside.
(b) Thims, Libb. (2007). Human Chemistry (Volume One), (preview), (Section: “Gottman stability ratios”, pgs. 179-182). Morrisville, NC: LuLu.
(c) Thims, Libb. (2008). The Human Molecule, (preview), (pg. 46). Morrisville, NC: LuLu.
3. Dabbs, James M. and Stokes, Neil A. (1975). “Beauty is Power: the Use of Space on the Sidewalk” (abs), Sociometry, 38: 551-57.
4. (a) Hartnett, J.J. Bailey, and Harley, C. (1974). “Body Height, Position, and Sex as Determinants of Personal Space” (abs), Journal of Psychology¸ 87:129-36.
(b) Etcoff, Nancy. (1999). Survival of the Prettiest: the Science of Beauty (pg. 46). New York: Anchor Books.
5. (a) Prigogine, Ilya. (2003). “Surprises in a Half Century”, in: Uncertainty and Surprise in Complex Systems: Questions on Working with the Unexpected (editors: Reubein R. McDaniel and Dean J. Driebe) (pgs. 13-16; experiment, pg. 16). Springer, 2005.
(b) Thims, Libb. (2008). “On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat and Occupation” (Ѻ) (pdf), Journal of Human Thermodynamics, Vol. 3, Issue 1. pgs. 1-7, April.
6. Goss, S. Aron, S. Deneubourg, J.L., and Pasteels, J.M. (1989). “Self-organized Shortcuts in the Argentine Ant”, Naturwissenschaften, 76:579-81.
7. Nichols, Shaun and Knobe, Joshua. (2007). “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: the Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions” (Ѻ), Nous, 41:663-85; in: Experimental Philosophy (editors: Joshua Knobe and Shuan Nichols) (§6:105-28) (pdf), Oxford University Press, 2008.
8. Greene, Joshua. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (determinism study, pgs. 273-74). Penguin.

External links
● Scientific study – Wikipedia.