Distant Persuasion

As lawyers, salesmen and politicians should know, persuasion is an art. What they probably do not know is that varying the distance between the speaker and his target may affect the persuader's success. Within limits, report Psychologists Stuart Albert and James M. Dabbs Jr., the more distance there is the likelier the argument is to succeed.

That conclusion can be drawn from an experiment conducted by the two men at the University of Michigan and reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their subjects, 90 male undergraduates, were individually led into a conference room and seated at one end of a table. Then another student, who was assigned the role of persuader, entered the room, took a seat, and for five minutes urged upon the listener the dangers of overpopulation. The advocate spoke from three distances: one to two feet, five to six feet and 14 to 15 feet. To measure the speaker's effectiveness, the listeners were required to answer questionnaires, before and after hearing him, that assessed changes in their attitudes toward the population problem.

Personal Distance. The psychologists had expected their spokesman to be most persuasive from the middle distance, five to six feet. Any nearer approach would invade what Northwestern University Anthropologist Edward T. Hall and others have called "personal distance"--an invisible sphere that most animals, as well as man, consider off limits to strangers. The greatest separation corresponds to "public distance": presumably far enough off to discourage personal communication. To Albert and Dabbs, five to six feet seemed just about right, being neither too close for comfort nor so far off as to present only a modest claim on the subject's attention.

To their surprise, the speaker proved more persuasive at 14 to 15 feet than he did closer up. This despite the fact that from farther off the subjects paid more attention to the speaker's person than to his message. More work is needed, the authors say, to explain this unexpected result. The same is true of a question left unanswered by their experiment: Would persuasiveness continue to rise at still greater distances?

For serious practitioners of the art of persuasion, the implication seems obvious. A lawyer summing up his case to the jury, for instance, might be wise to do so from the middle of the courtroom. The politician had better get his fingers off that lapel, and the peripatetic salesman would do well to remove his foot from the door.

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