Exploring the correlation between risk-taking and comfortable personal space during COVID-19 outbreak.

Until 2020, comfortable personal space was identified with Edward Hall’s theory that emotions and relation determine our comfortable zones towards others. In the times of COVID-19 pandemic outbreak our reality has changed and we had to face with numerous restrictions that could have influenced the distance in which we felt agreeable. In the current study, we aimed to explore whether the comfortable distance in condition of approaching people varies according to contextual (i.e., wearing a mask) and social (e.g., being a friend) variables. We aim to further explore whether risk-taking behavior influences people’s comfortable personal space. We would expect that people with tendency to take risks would allow others to approach closer compared to non risk-takers. To our goals, we recruited 24 participants (Italian N =11, Polish N = 13) who were administered with the Computerized Comfortable Interpersonal Distance task (cCID) and Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Our results are in line with Hall’s theory – we found that generally people allow their friends to come closer than strangers. Additionally obtained results show that people allow their friends without facemasks to come at the same distance as the strangers wearing facemasks. We did not found any significant influence of tendency to take risks and one’s lenght of comfortable space. The pandemic’s spread was an important limitation during the data collection process and we for future research we suggest to provide such study on a bigger and more unified group.