Everything King Midas touched turned to gold, but it didn’t make him happy. Maybe that’s because gold is cold and hard, not such a pleasant tactile sensation. Our sense of touch has gotten short shrift over the years; we usually pay more attention to how things look, sound, taste, and even smell before we care how they feel. But new research reveals that what we touch affects our life outlook, though our tactile sense doesn’t always tell us the truth.
Living by the Seat of Our Pants
Our sense of touch profoundly affects our worldview, according to John A. Bargh, of Yale, and his colleagues from Yale, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their study, published in the June 25, 2010, issue of Science, builds on a previous study by Bargh that found people judge others differently depending on whether the cup of liquid they are holding is cold or warm. Bargh’s new research, which involved about three hundred participants and varied experiments, tells us more about the link between our tactile sense and decision making.
One of the experiments, for example, showed that participants who sat on hard chairs were less likely to compromise in price negotiations than the ones who sat on softer, cushioned chairs. “It’s behavioral priming through the seat of the pants,” says Bargh in a press release, adding that physical sensations “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.”
Through their experiments, Bargh and his colleagues also learned:
- Participants who arranged a rough jigsaw puzzle, rather than a smooth one, and then read a passage about an interaction between two people were more likely to describe the interaction as adversarial.
- Job interviewers who hold heavy clipboards are more likely to believe that applicants are serious about their work.
- Bosses asked to hold a soft blanket or a hard wooden block before being told a story about the interaction between an employee and supervisor in their workplace were more likely to judge the employee harshly if they held the block, not the blanket.
