What Is the Proximity Principle in Psychology?

Key Takeaways

• People form close relationships with those they see and interact with often.
• In Gestalt psychology, objects close together are seen as a group.
• Sitting near someone can make it more likely to become friends.

We tend to form close relationships with people we see and interact with often, whether it’s classmates, coworkers, neighbors, or others that we encounter regularly in our everyday lives. The reason why this happens is referred to as the proximity principle in psychology. It describes the way relationships are formed between things close to one another. It explains why physical closeness—or even the perception of closeness—plays a big part in our interpersonal relationships.

In Gestalt psychology, the proximity principle is one of several Gestalt principles of perceptual organization and states that people treat objects close together as a group.

In social psychology, the proximity principle suggests that people closer together in a physical environment are more likely to form a relationship than those farther away.

Decades of research have revealed that frequent exposure to other people increases our familiarity and attraction, which is why proximity plays such a big role in forming and maintaining relationships. It also helps explain why long-distance relationships can be so hard to maintain—and opens up questions about how connections beyond the physical space (think online, text, and other forms of digital communication) might impact our relationships.

Keep reading to learn more about how the proximity principle works, it’s impact on our daily lives, and how to use it to help build stronger social connections.

The Proximity Principle in Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt psychology was a school of thought founded in the early 20th century by a group of German psychologists who wanted to explain how the human mind perceives visual information. They discovered that humans automatically impose structure on what they see, ensuring we’re more likely to understand our worlds in terms of whole objects instead of disconnected bits and pieces.

To explain this, they developed a series of principles that describe how we organize and interpret shapes, figures, objects, colors, and any other element we perceive. These were dubbed Gestalt principles because Gestalt means “shape” in German.

One of the original Gestalt principles is the principle (or law) of proximity, which claims that things closer to each other appear more related than things farther apart. Proximity has remarkable sway over our visual perception, to the point that it can even override other factors such as similarity in color or shape.

Examples of the Proximity Principle

Consider this article. The words are organized into sentences, which are then organized into paragraphs. As a result, you see each paragraph as an individual group. Even if I wrote every other sentence in each paragraph in red, you would still read each paragraph as a unit instead of reading all the black sentences and then all the red sentences.

Organizing the sentences based on proximity overrides any instinct to organize the sentences based on similar colors.

However, keep in mind that the principle of proximity and the other Gestalt laws of perceptual organization are not infallible truths but heuristics, or mental shortcuts, that we use to understand what we see quickly. This is helpful from a cognitive standpoint as it prevents us from becoming overloaded by the plethora of visual information we take in daily. Yet, it can also lead to misperception.

For example, think about a photo where an object like a lamppost appears to be rising out of a person’s head. When someone took the photo, the lamppost may have been far behind them, but we group the person’s head and the lamppost because the three-dimensional space was collapsed into a two-dimensional image. In two dimensions, they visually appear to form a single entity.

The Proximity Principle in Social Psychology

Interestingly, just as our visual perception tends to perceive objects in close proximity as related, people who are in close physical proximity naturally tend to form relationships with one another. This is a much-studied phenomenon in social psychology.

Even though being close to someone affects us without us even realizing it, research also suggests that it has a significant impact on who we connect with and spend time with the most. While this means you are more likely to form relationships with people who live and work in the same city, it’s also more specific than that.

For instance, people who sit physically closer together in the same office or classroom are more likely to form relationships than those who sit farther apart. In one study, children were more likely to become friends with kids seated near them than students who were seated further away. As a result, people may be more likely to strike up a friendship with their lab partner at school or their co-worker in the next cubicle than with someone else.

Research on the Proximity Principle

One early landmark study on proximity by Festinger, Schacter, and Back found that a relatively homogenous group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were more likely to form friendships with other students who lived in the same dorm. Moreover, students were more likely to form close friendships with the people who lived next door to them than those who lived two doors down.

Part of this phenomenon may be explained by the mere exposure effect, which suggests that repeated exposure to a stimulus, including another person, can lead to an implicit preference for it. So barring the interference of other variables, people who see one another regularly due to close proximity may start to prefer one another over people who are farther away based on their frequent exposure to one another.

Some research demonstrates that even though people are more likely to form relationships with those who are physically closer to them, those relationships aren’t always positive.

For example, one classic study on the subject found that people are more likely to dislike those who live close to them. While friendship was also shown to be dependent on physical proximity, friendships required frequent face-to-face contact to thrive. In contrast, disliking thrived even if those who lived in close proximity rarely saw one another in person.

Thus, just as positive interactions with those in close physical proximity can lead to positive interpersonal connections, undesired actions by those nearby can lead to negative interpersonal connections.

Downsides of the Proximity Principle

The proximity principle can often have a positive effect on our lives. When it comes to perception, it helps us make sense of the world around us and see things more coherently. In our social relationships, it helps promote harmony, cooperation, and closeness in groups. But it can also have a few potential downsides.

Sometimes, it can prevent us from forming connections with a more diverse group of people. For example, say you go to a school with a homogenous student body and, therefore, only form friendships with those similar to you in factors like race and class. This can result in stereotyping and intolerance of those who may be different.

On the other hand, this tendency can also have an upside when we use it to promote new understandings. For example, we could use the proximity principle to increase tolerance by ensuring a diverse group of people from various backgrounds, genders, races, and classes are represented in schools, offices, and other places where people are in close proximity to one another.

Proximity in Everyday Life

The proximity principle plays a big role in our lives, whether we realize it or not. It helps explain why certain co-workers end up being our best friends and why we often get along best with the people we see the most often. It can also help us understand why staying connected—particularly to people we don’t get to see often—can be so challenging.

By understanding the effects of proximity, we can take steps to reach out and strengthen our relationships, even when we can’t spend time together face-to-face.

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

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By Cynthia Vinney, PhD

Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

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