Tag Archive for Tolerance

Spatial Empathy

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

This 'fugitive,' trying to escape a space invader.

This ‘fugitive’ is trying to escape a space invader.

“Spatial empathy” is an informal term used by expatriate workers in Hong Kong and then later in Japan and China who were typically from Australia, England, France and the United States. The term was use to describe the awareness that individuals have about how their proximity affects the comfort of the people around them. Even though cities such as Hong Kong, Japan and China were westernized, the walkways and public transport system were very crowded by comparison. The expatriates found that preventing intrusion into their personal space was difficult and at times impossible.

The foreign workers that were not accustomed to physical closeness and physical contact were made to feel violated by the locals. They felt that their privacy was being infringed upon and that their personal space requirements weren’t being met. What the workers failed to realize was that it was their responsibility to adapt to the cultural norms of the locals and not the other way around so while the locals had no spatial empathy the workers had no cultural empathy.

While spatial empathy was first coined to describe the differences between cultures it also has application within cultures as some people have different levels of tolerance with regards to their personal space. Naturally, it is your choice to decide what you will do with someone else’s preference, be it to respect it by reading their signals and give them space, or ignore it and invade it. I supposed it would have everything to do with what your goals happens to be. Will you respect the needs of the people around you and try to make them feel comfortable or will you invade their space to fulfill your own needs?

Status, Context And Personal Space

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

Status and context affect spatial and proximity rules. For example, bosses are in charge of determining what level of closeness is appropriate and permitted as it relates to subordinate employees. This isn’t to say that employees enjoy this arrangement but rather that employees are not permitted to reverse proximity rules onto employers. Subordinate employees have many roles and one of them is tolerance of the rules set for them by their seniors. For example, a boss might pat the back of one his employees or put his or her arm around the new associate as a form of bonding. Reversal of the situation would be seen as an infringement on the status of the boss. When it comes to touching, a subordinate should never encroach on the personal space of someone holding a dominant position.

Contextual rules also exist with respect to personal space. In the office, it would be un-acceptable for sexual partners to touch one another or carry on in front of others. However, in the same office hosting a year-end business party with all of the same employees and their spouse’s, touching and even kissing would be common place.
Therefore, status and context are two other factors we should be conscious of as they relate to proximity and space.

Introduction – Chapter 3

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

If you spend time traveling or do business in more than one country then this chapter will prove invaluable. Not all body language happens the same way all over the world. To some this revelation gives them ammunition against body language because they say that since it is not totally universal, it is not innate and therefore not predictive, however this is not so. While some body language crosses culture, other language does not, what is important though, it to know which is which. We will spend the following chapter looking at how body language varies from region to region and hence from culture to culture and you will see that some body language is learned while some innate or genetic.

As we progress we will look at how emblems, illustrators, affect displays, adaptors and regulators add colour to our language and as how to use them. We will also discuss how these facets of body language vary across regions. The two take-away messages from this chapter is that it is the sender that determines the accuracy of the message no matter what the culture, and that it is up to you to decide what it means, and that it is the culture in which we find ourselves which dictates what’s normal. In this context, normal is what tells us how we should comport ourselves. We will see that our innate body language dictates our culture, that some gestures are universal (and some are not) and that touching preferences and desire (or tolerance) to closeness is learned. Finally we will cover the ways in which cultures meet and greet one-another.