Why should touch be used when influencing others!

14/01/2012

How do you feel about touching people? Attitudes to being touched and touching are driven by many cultural and personal factors.

However recent studies have pointed to the power of touching – without regard to who or what is doing the touching – to improve relationships and modify outcome in a variety of social and work situations. 

• Library users who are touched while registering, rate the library and its personnel more favourably than the non-touched;
• Diners are more satisfied and give larger tips when waiting staff touch them casually;
• People touched by a stranger are more willing to perform a mundane favour;
• Women touched by a man on the arm are more willing to share their phone number or agree to a dance.

Until now research in this area has been exclusively behavioural: these effects have been observed, but we don't really know why. Now a study has made a start at understanding the neuroscience of how touch exerts its psychological effects. 

Annett Schirmer and her colleagues used EEG to record the surface electrical activity of the brains of dozens of female participants who were tasked with looking at neutral or negative pictures Before each picture appeared, the participants were sometimes touched on the arm by a female friend; touched by a mechanical device (a pressure cuff); or they received no touch. The idea was to see whether and how being touched changed the way the brain responded to emotional and neutral pictures. The findings indicate that

• A touch on the arm enhanced readiness to empathize with and support that person
• Touch had this effect regardless of how it was administered and who did the administering (friend or machine).

This suggests the reported effects of touch are largely "bottom up" - that is, based mainly on the incoming stimulation - rather than "top down", to do with beliefs about the meaning of the touch.

"Emotional information presented concurrently with touch may be more motivating such that more processing resources are allocated to them than to emotional information presented without touch. ….The tactile signal alerts its recipient and enhances the processing of concurrent events, particularly if they are emotional. 

Such enhanced processing may then, among others, boost empathy and increase the likelihood that the touch recipient acts in favour of the toucher.” the researchers said.

What this means in practice is that touching somebody when trying to persuade them (for example in a sales situation) is likely to have a very beneficial effect because touching causes a positive reaction that is then associated with what is being said.

It won’t surprise you to hear that we think Emotional Intelligence is still a key variable in knowing when and how to use touch – particularly in the workplace. But – an interesting study. Maybe we should ‘loosen up’ a little bit, on touch!

What do you think? Do you use touch in your work with clients or when you are trying to persuade somebody? Does touch help boost your empathy in a business situation?

Let us know what you think (news@brentfield.com) or follow the discussion on linkedin 

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Schirmer, A., Teh, K., Wang, S., Vijayakumar, R., Ching, A., Nithianantham, D., Escoffier, N., and Cheok, A. (2011). Squeeze me, but don't tease me: Human and mechanical touch enhance visual attention and emotion discrimination. Social Neuroscience, 6 (3), 219-230 

 

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