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Sense of Touch Affects Our World

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Study Shows Link Between Sense of Touch and the Decisions People
Make
By Bill Hendrick
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD on June 24, 2010
FROM THE WEBMD ARCHIVES 
June 24, 2010 -- Our sense of touch profoundly affects
how we view the world and other people, influencing
thoughts and behavior, new research indicates.
Investigators at Yale, Harvard, and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology report that textures, shapes, and
weights can influence judgments and decisions.
The researchers, for example, say that:

 People sitting on hard, cushion-less chairs are less

likely to compromise in price negotiations than people
sitting on softer chairs.
 Interviewers holding a heavy clipboard are likely to
think job applicants take their work more seriously
than if the clipboard is less weighty.

The researchers conducted a series of six experiments to

demonstrate how dramatically the sense of touch affects
how people view others and the world.
"It is behavioral priming through the seat of the pants,"
says study researcher John A. Bargh, PhD, of Yale, in a
news release. "The old concepts of mind-body dualism are
turning out not to be true at all. Our minds are deeply and
organically linked to our bodies."
Bargh worked on the study along with former Yale
researchers Joshua M. Ackerman, PhD, now of MIT, and
Christopher C. Nocera, a graduate student at Harvard.
In addition to concluding that a hard chair creates a
hard heart, the researchers also had participants arrange a
rough or smooth jigsaw puzzle and then read a passage
about an interaction between two people. Participants
were more likely to characterize the interaction as
adversarial if they had first handled rough, jigsaw puzzle
pieces, as opposed to smooth ones.
The study, reported in the June 25 issue of Science, builds
on previous work by Bargh that found people judge others
to be more generous and caring after they had briefly held
a cup of warm coffee rather than a cold drink.

Physical Experiences Influence Behavior

Bargh says in the news release that physical concepts such
as warmth, hardness, and roughness are among the first
feelings infants develop and remember.
Such feelings, he says, are critical to how young children
and adults eventually develop abstract concepts about
people and relationships.
These sensations, he says, help create a mental scaffold
on which our understandings about the world develop as
we age.

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And they are reflected in such common expressions as

"having a rough day" or "taking a hard line" or "weighing
in with an opinion."
He says physical experiences "not only shape the
foundation of our thoughts and perceptions, but influence
our behavior toward others, sometimes just because we
are sitting in a hard instead of a soft chair."
Nocera says in a second news release that touch "remains
perhaps the most underappreciated sense in behavioral
research" and that their experiments suggest that
"greetings involving touch, such as handshakes and cheek
kisses, may in fact have critical influences on our social
interactions in an unconscious fashion."
The researchers write that first impressions drawn from
the tactile environment "may be especially important for
negotiators, pollsters, job seekers and others interested in
interpersonal communication. The use of 'tactile tactics'
may represent a new frontier in social influence and
communication."
In the series of experiments, researchers studied how
objects' weight, texture and hardness could unconsciously
influence judgments about unrelated events.
In another test of hardness, people were asked to handle
either a soft blanket or a hard wooden block before being
told an ambiguous story about a workplace interaction
between an employee and a supervisor. Those bosses who
touched the block judged the employee as more rigid and
strict.
The experiments, involving about 300 people, involved
mock price negotiations, puzzle playing with smooth or
rough pieces, getting participants to sit in hard or soft
chairs, and asking some to try to guess the secret of a
magic act.