Edward Hall was an anthropologist who had worked with the Foreign Service, training American personnel for overseas posts, and he kept encountering the same complaint from both sides. Americans found Latin American and Middle Eastern counterparts pushy, aggressive, or improperly familiar. Those counterparts found Americans cold, aloof, and evasive.
Nobody was doing anything wrong. They were standing at different distances.
Hall's 1966 book The Hidden Dimension named the field proxemics and set out the distance zones he had observed among middle-class Americans in the northeastern United States — a qualification he stated explicitly and that is almost always dropped when his figures are quoted. Intimate distance, from contact out to about eighteen inches, reserved for people you are close to and for physical confrontation. Personal distance, roughly one and a half to four feet, the range of ordinary conversation between friends. Social distance, four to twelve feet, for business and for interaction with strangers. Public distance beyond that, for lectures and for formal address.
The important part of Hall's argument was not the numbers but the claim that distance is a channel. It communicates the relationship between the parties, it is negotiated continuously and mostly unconsciously, and it is enforced by discomfort. Entry into a zone you have not been granted produces autonomic arousal in the person whose space it is — the body registers unearned proximity as either a threat or a claim of intimacy, and both are alarming from a stranger.
Which is exactly what makes deliberate distance violation a technique.
Closing to intimate range while remaining verbally polite generates arousal the target cannot easily attribute, because nothing has been said that could be objected to. In an interrogation setting, moving a chair into the subject's space, removing the table, or standing over a seated person are documented techniques whose purpose is to raise stress without any statement that could be quoted. In sales, closing distance while pointing at a document manufactures the physical proximity of confidence and makes disengagement awkward. In social predation, the incremental approach — each conversation a little closer than the last — installs a familiarity that was never granted, and the target's own reluctance to make a scene about six inches does the rest.
And the cross-cultural version produces damage without anyone intending it. Hall's zones are not universal; contact cultures conduct ordinary conversation at ranges that would read as confrontation elsewhere. An American diplomat backing away from a Brazilian counterpart, who follows, is a documented phenomenon: neither party perceives themselves as moving, and both leave with a wrong impression of the other's character.
The countermeasure is to treat space as something you are permitted to manage explicitly, which most people do not feel entitled to do. You may move your chair. You may stand up. You may put a table between yourself and someone else, take a step back, or say plainly that you would like a bit more room. The discomfort of doing any of these is small and the alternative is being handled physically while pretending it is not happening.
See Defense: reclaiming spatial control