Sorokowska and colleagues investigated how personal space preferences influenced COVID-19’s spread; interpersonal spacing is a core environmental psychology research area. The Sorokowska-lead team report that “it was explored if interpersonal distance preferences . . . were valid measures of physical distancing in contacts between strangers and whether they related to country-level variation in early dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 spread. The analysis, based on aggregated data from more than 9,000 participants, showed that variation in early dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 spread (i.e., total number of SARS-CoV-2 cases 20 days after the 100th case) was . . . significantly and negatively related to the preferred interpersonal distance between strangers.”
Agnieszka Sorokowska, Supreet Saluja, Konstantinos Kafetsios, and Ilona Croy. 2022. “Interpersonal Distancing Preferences, Touch Behaviors to Strangers, and Country-Level Early Dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 Spread.” American Psychologist, vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 124-134, https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000919