The researchers were interested in whether the men would be more successful when they touched the women than when they didn’t. How important is touch as a social cue? Over the course of the day, the young men collected three dozen phone numbers. When they didn’t touch the women, they had a success rate of 10 percent; when they touched them, their success rate was 20 percent. That light one-second touch doubled their popularity. Why were the touched women twice as likely to agree to a date? Were they thinking, This Antoine is a good toucher—it’d probably be fun to knock down a bottle of Bordeaux with him some night at Bar de l’Océan? Probably not. But on the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.

Unlike non­Euclidean geometry, touch research has many obvious applications. For example, in an experiment involving eight servers and several hundred restaurant diners, the servers were trained to touch randomly selected customers briefly on the arm toward the end of the meal while asking if “everything was all right.” The servers received an average tip of about 14.5 percent from those they didn’t touch, but 17.5 percent from those they did. Another study found the same effect on tipping at a bar. And in another restaurant study, about 60 percent of diners took the server’s suggestion to order the special after being touched lightly on the forearm, compared with only about 40 percent of those who were not touched. Touching has been found to increase the fraction of single women in a nightclub who will accept an invitation to dance, the number of people agreeing to sign a petition, the chances that a college student will risk embarrassment by volunteering to go to the blackboard in a statistics class, the proportion of busy passersby in a mall willing to take ten minutes to fill out a survey form, the percentage of shoppers in a supermarket who purchase food they had sampled, and the odds that a bystander who had just provided someone with directions will help him pick up a bunch of computer disks he drops.

You might be skeptical of this. After all, some people recoil when a stranger touches them. And it is possible that some of the subjects in the studies I quoted did recoil but that their reactions were outweighed by the reactions of those who reacted positively. Remember, though, these were all very subtle touches, not gropes. In fact, in studies in which the touched person was later debriefed about the experience, typically less than ­one-third of the subjects were even aware that they had been touched.

So are touchy-feely people more successful at getting things done? There is no data on whether bosses who dole out the occasional pat on the head run a smoother operation, but a 2010 study by a group of researchers in Berkeley found a case in which a habit of congratulatory slaps-to-the-skull really is associated with successful group interactions. The Berkeley researchers studied the sport of basketball, which both requires extensive second-by­second teamwork and is known for its elaborate language of touching. They found that the number of “fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, half hugs, and team huddles” correlated significantly with the degree of cooperation among teammates, such as passing to those who are less closely defended, helping others escape defensive pressure by setting what are called “screens,” and otherwise displaying a reliance on a teammate at the expense of one’s own individual performance. The teams that touched the most cooperated the most, and won the most.

Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain. That is, scientists have discovered a particular kind of nerve fiber in people’s skin—especially in the face and arms—that appears to have developed specifically to transmit the pleasantness of social touch. Those nerve fibers transmit their signal too slowly to be of much use in helping you do the things you normally associate with the sense of ­touch: determining what is touching you and telling you, with some precision, where you were touched. “They won’t help you distinguish a pear from pumice or your cheek from your chin,” says the social neuroscientist pioneer Ralph Adolphs. “But they are connected directly to areas of the brain such as the insular cortex, which is associated with emotion.”

4 Comments

1. 1. geojellyroll 11:24 AM 4/25/12

   I've also experienced this in life. Being French, I usually hug a woman when I first meet her. I thought that touch signals a non-threatening 'comfort zone'. The defense barriers are dropped.
   
   Also, there may be a chicken and egg scenario. We may pick up on facial or body signals that first allow the casual 'touch'. Those we touch were more likely in our activity criteria than those that were not.
   
   Re the article...no Frenchman in the world would not take advantage of the phone numbers he received during the experiment.

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2. 2. shinymind 01:41 PM 4/25/12

   Great article. There is a vast untapped market of painfully introverted scientists, engineers and mathematicians out there, hungry for a logical motivation to make an ass of themselves. This might just be it. I smell another great Mlodinow book ;)

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3. 3. jgrosay 04:57 PM 4/25/12

   This kind of "soft touchings" are good when you think showing intentions of obtaining a date or another kind of intimate connection with the other person, as skin is our largest and more easily excitable erotic zone. The issue is that many fellows use touching as a way to obtain in an automatic and irreflexive way a positive feeling inside you towards them, and this is somehow bringing you down to an animal or sexual object condition, and opening your mind's firewall to being abused. Some saints had as the final step in withdrawing from unnecessary bonds with the material world, refraining from any kind of touch, and Jesus after resurrection said to Maria Magdalena "Don't touch me", meaning probably "Don't paw me". Touching is good with your wife or husband, hugging is good sometimes with your kids, anything that goes beyond this can enter dangerous fields, too much intimacy is probably worse than no intimacy at all, the medicine Nobel prize winner Santiago Ramon y Cajal discovered that brain cells do have membranes as barriers, and are not a meta-unit of fusioned cells as some believed before, and there are lots of people trying to destroy the "membranes" that isolate you from the outer world in their own benefit; the concept of an organic society you can find in authors so different as Spengler, that suffered critics from Freud, and the law expert Kelsen would be regarded today by many as totalitarian.

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4. 4. tommyoctober 04:44 PM 5/4/12

   Cudos, SHinyMind. Perhaps by touching others, the "touchers" made and released their own pheromones that made the "touchee" more attracted to them. I mean, the % moved from 10% to 20%------not insignificant, but not monumental either.

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