Introduction

Are people too lazy to recycle? Or maybe they are just heartless beings, and could care less if the Earth became heavily polluted. But a more realistic reason as to why people don't recycle or even think about doing so is because of the Law of Proximity. The Law of Proximity simply states that when objects appear close to one another they tend to be perceived as a group. In this case, both the garbage and recycling bins are one group. But before we continue on about our experiment, some scientific background is needed in order to fully comprehend our experiment. The Law of Proximity is actually a subcategory to a much larger law. The bigger law being the Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization. This specific principle can be translated to convenience since whatever group that is being perceived is being formed on the basis that they are near one another. thus logically forming a group. A better explanation for this would be to use an example from a scientific observation from the 1950's at MIT. Researchers were studying friendship formation by asking 300 MIT students to list down their closest friends. Shockingly, the researchers quickly found out that The Law of Proximity applied to how people chose their friendships. During their research they noticed that if someone lived one door away, there was a 41% chance they were listed as a close friend. However, as the number of doors increased, the likelihood decreased such as those people living four doors away had only a 10% chance of being listed as a close friend. The same can be said for choosing a mate. If you have a girlfriend or boyfriend, chances are they are in your proximity sometime during the day. Besides being used in choosing friends or searching for a partner, The Law of Proximity is also used in the media and businesses. Symbols and various logos use the Law of Proximity to create purpose and cohesiveness in order to make them memorable. For example: The Adidas logo uses the Law of Proximity in order to make people create cohesiveness by making them realize the relationships between the shapes based on their proximity. If we were to randomly change one of the piece’s proximity, the Adidas logo would be, for the most part, the same as before only our perception of it would have changed because of the difference in proximity for both of them. Not to be mistaken with The Law of Closure which states that in order for the viewer to be successful the viewer must help “complete” the shape by filling in missing pieces of the design. The Law of Proximity is simply assuming that all objects are considered one group based solely on their nearness to one another. A great example of this is by having logos near each other to better show the increase in letter height. Some history behind the Law of Proximity and the overall theory- The Gestalt Laws- will help us better understand the scientific background even more. Max Wertheimer was the founder for Gestalt Psychology. He founded this theory in retaliation against Molecularism of Wundt's program of Psychology. The actual word “Gestalt” was originated by Christian von Ehrenfels who mentored none other than Max Wetheimer who was at the time his student. Basically speaking, Wertheimer explained that the observations that we experience are not part of our simple sensations. Rather, they are nothing more than rapid individual sensory events. Even more interesting is the fact that Gestalt Psychologist say that we are naturally built to experience a whole sensation rather than individual sensations. The word “Gestalt” in current German means “to put together”.