The relationships between different people can change over time, as the result of their life choices, internal or external experiences and various other factors. Some people develop a greater tendency to avoid others in their lives, including friends, colleagues, family members and acquaintances.

Researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai recently set out to test the hypothesis that social avoidance could be quantified as people’s navigation in an abstract social space. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, introduces a new framework for studying and probing people’s social avoidance.

“This work grew out of the idea that the way that people often talk about navigating social relationships —’climbing the ladder’ at work, or ‘growing distant’ from a friend—might be more than a metaphor,” Matthew Schafer, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.