Private space: why in Russian life there is no place for privacy

Фото: Depositphotos

The Russians turned out to be people who do not greatly respect the personal space.

This is evidenced by data from a study conducted Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, the translation of which article was published Inosmi.

The study of how people from different countries imagine the ideal personal space, it is assumed that the Russians love to stay closer to each other. Researchers interviewed 9 from thousands of people from different countries to calculate the international scope of their personal space.

The Russians were in it in the "occupiers", which indicates either extreme need or extreme constraint.

The study was an attempt to test the theory of the relationship of weather, in particular air temperature and distance between people during a conversation. Some sociologists believe that warm weather brings people closer. Others - that it increases the distance between them due to the risk of infection by parasites and diseases. The confirmation found the first guess. A warm climate really destroys personal space. But there are still some exception countries. It turned out that in Russia personal space is as limited as in Argentina, despite the radically different weather conditions. These data greatly complicated the results of the study.

But later, scientists came to the conclusion that the Russian example is explained not by the climate, but by the mentality.

In Russian, there is no word denoting a personal spatial category. You can say: “Leave me alone” or “Leave me alone.”

Moreover, it is obvious that the idea of ​​“private property” existed before, otherwise it would not have been prohibited during the era of the Soviet Union. But it is impossible to literally translate the phrase “Can you give me some privacy? Transferring this situation to the concept of personal space would not be an exaggeration.

In Russian, you can have “private life”, you can conduct “personal affairs”. There are many words for solitude and loneliness. But there is not a single word that would mean the physical space around you, which should be private and belong exclusively to you. His role here could not play the experience of communal life. Most people who were born in Russia between 1900 and 1980 lived in a communal apartment at some time during their existence. And this is a place where there is no personal space.

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