The Dallas Morning News
If they lean back in the chair, away from him, he’s got more work to do. But if they lean forward, he knows in a few minutes they’ll be huddled with him over a contract. “There’s so much you can glean from observing the distances between people when they interact,” says Dr. William Pulte, anthropologist, linguist and associate professor in Southern Methodist University’s Education Department.
Proxemics, the study of how people perceive and use the space around them, was founded in the 1950s by anthropologist Edward T. Hall, and popularized in several of his books – “The Silent Language” (1959) and “The Hidden Dimension” (1966). Hall observed that humans like to keep their distances from one another, and that those distances vary according to social interactions. >>continue