Distance Matters more than You Think! An Artifact Clouds Interpretation of Latane, Liu, Nowak, Bonevento, and Zheng’s Results

Abstract

Latane, Liu, Nowak, Bonevento, and Zheng reported three surveys that led them to conclude that the number of memorable interactions decreases as a function of geographical distance raised to the first power. Although interactions certainly decayed with distance, the particular decay function that they report appears to be an artifact of their memorable-interactions-per-mile measure. In effect, they took remembered interactions, divided them by distance, and then plotted them against distance. The fact that the inverse of distance plotted against distance has a slope of -1.00 when plotted in logarithms is tautological, not psychological. Of course distance matters, but we need to look elsewhere to find out precisely how.