speeded decision making tasks, studies have suggested a systematic relationship between social distance and physical distance. When asked to either indicate the spatial location of a presented word or verify a word’s presence, people respond more quickly when "we" was displayed in a spatially proximate versus spatially distant location and when "others" was displayed in a spatially distant versus a spatially proximate location. This suggests that social distance and physical distance are conceptually related. Route planning exercises have also hinted at a conceptual link between social distance and physical distance. When asked to draw a route on a map, people tend to draw routes closer to friends they pass along the way and further away from strangers. This effect is robust even after controlling for how easy it is for the people passing one another to communicate. There is some evidence that reasoning about social distance and physical distance draw on shared processing resources in the human parietal cortex. Practical implications Prejudice Social distance can emerge between groups that differ on a variety of dimensions, including culture, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. Construal level theory suggests that greater social distance can contribute to a reliance on stereotypes when evaluating socially distant individuals/groups. The relationship between social distance and prejudice is documented in studies of attitudes towards individuals who suffer from a mental illness. Distance from the mentally ill and the desire to maintain it depends on the diagnosis, and varies across age groups and nationalities. The desire to maintain social distance is reduced with exposure to/familiarity with mental illness, and increased with perceptions that mentally ill individuals are dangerous. Generosity Social distance has been incorporated in economic decision making experiments using the ultimatum game and the dictator game. In this line of work, researchers increase social distance by anonymizing economic decisions. This work finds that social distance reduces altruistic behavior. A similar line of work aimed to reduce social distance by increasing social cues, or by incorporating minimal forms of interaction. These manipulations showed that decreasing social distance increases generosity. Power Research on the relationship between power and social distance suggests that powerful individuals have a greater perception of distance from others. Based on construal level theory, this means that powerful individuals are more likely to engage in high-level construals. This connection between power, social distance, and construal level has been used to explain other features of cognitions and behaviors related