Several studies have supported Hall’s (1966) theory that people place themselves closer to others
they like than to others they dislike (Altman & Vinsel, 1977; Mehrabian, 1972, 1981). Moreover, people
stand closer to friends than to acquaintances and stand farthest away from strangers (Altman &
Vinsel, 1977; Little, 1965). In the school context, little is known about children’s preferred closeness
to classmates. In an observational study of adolescent girls at lunch time, Eder (1985) found that girls
saved specific seats at their lunch table for their friends. Kutnick and Kington (2005) asked children
who they wanted to work with in class and tested how successful friendship pairs were on science
reasoning tasks. They found that female friend dyads performed best, whereas male friend dyads performed
worst. Still, when children could choose who to work with, both boys and girls indicated that
they wanted to collaborate with friends rather than classmates who were not friends. Therefore, we
hypothesized that (a) children would place themselves closer to peers they like and (b) children
who are well liked by the majority of their peers would have a smaller interpersonal distance to their
peers in general