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

University of Arkansas, eknowles{at}comp.uark.edu

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.

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