A survey into how different countries view ideal personal space suggests Russians like to retain things close. Could language and communal living have something to carry out with it?Why carry out Russians have no sense of personal space? A study by the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology surveyed 9000 people from a series of countries in order to calculate an international scale of personal space. Dubbed “the space invaders”,the Russians came out of it looking either extremely needy or extremely squashed.
The study was an attempt to test theories approximately temperature and conversation distance. Some sociologists believe warm weather brings people closer. Others say it drives them apart because of the risk of parasites and disease. The former were proved right. (A warm climate does collapse personal space. Argentina scored very highly.) But then came the outliers. The Russians reported almost as little personal space as the Argentinians, effectively messing up the results.
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Source: theguardian.com