Naturally, I'll Swerve to Avoid you

I've always wondered: why do people put so much effort into avoiding each other? This certainly isn't a universal thing, because in German and Turkey for instance, people would rather be close than anything else. Consider an empty classroom. You're the only one sitting in the room, and you're sitting on the far right front row. A Turkish or German citizen would sit right up next to you, preparing for oodles of others to swarm in the door, and not afraid to pop your personal bubble. An born-and-bred American, however, would sit as far away as possible, so as to preserve the untouched air around you, and himself. 

But it's not only classrooms in which we avoid each other, but on the streets as well. We matrix-dodge out of the way in order to avoid sleeves brushing sleeves, or avert our eyes if people are approaching, rather than send them a friendly smile. I suppose we think: why would I bother to look, let alone smile, at a person who I'll never see again? But if we thought this, wouldn't we also not bother to be polite to them, shoving them at our discretion? Perhaps it's not that we want to be polite, or the opposite, but that we don't want to acknowledge strangers at all. I suppose touching a person, making their transience tangible, makes them real to us, and perhaps, Americans, obsessed with their bubbles, hesitate to let others form within their realms of reality. 

In Berlin, I seek to discover whether or not this strange cultural difference is just that: simply a cultural difference, or something more-- an ideology perhaps, or a product of some sort of dogma. This study would most likely fall under some sort of sociological theme, or a theme about "personal borders."