Effects of a violation of personal space on escape and helping responses

Four field experiments were carried out to examine the effects of a violation of personal space on the “victims” subsequent behavior. In Experiment I, it was found that male and female pedestrians crossed a street faster than controls if their personal space had been violated (while stationary before crossing) for 10 sec by an experimenter of the same sex. The remaining experiments examined how a violation of personal space would affect the nature of the subsequent victim-violator interaction, as inferred from the victims' and controls' differential helping of the violator. It was found that, in comparison to controls, a 10-sec stationary violation of pedestrians' personal space decreased the frequency with which they returned to the violator an object he “lost” only if the object was of low value to the violator (a pencil vs keys). However, victims of a combined stationary-and-moving (while walking across the street) violation helped the violator significantly less frequently than controls, irrespective of the value of the lost object. Implications of these results for an attributional analysis of personal space phenomena were discussed.