Why Touching Strangers is Good For You

Hear me out before you dismiss this one, there is a lot of science behind it. Touching people, even those we don't know, has a subtle unconscious impact. I should preface this also by saying that when I say touch I'm referring to a *light* touch on the arm, shoulder, or something similar. Downright groping someone or touching them for uncomfortably long will have the opposite effect of what I'm about to discuss. Here goes:

A huge portion of the way that people communicate is through nonverbal cues. Since so many of them are given off at once: Body language, tone of voice, eye contact or lack thereof just to name a few, we interpret these cues largely through our subconscious. Most of the time people don't even realize why they're getting certain vibes off people that have nothing to do with the words that come out of those people's mouths. One of the pioneer studies on the power of touch was done in France, using an attractive French guy to ask out women chosen at random in public in the name of science. For half the women he lightly touched their arm while asking them out, the other half he did not touch them at all. the results? The women he touched were twice as likely to give him their phone number versus those he didn't. Those are some pretty staggering results. The kicker, when asked (after being told the proposition was in the name of science) most of the women reported not even realizing he had touched them. It was light, subtle, and highly subconscious.

This phenomenon of people reacting positively to a subtle touch was repeated in many subsequent studies around the worlds...servers in restaurants who lightly touched their guests when asking if there was anything else they needed before handing them the check received higher tips consistently. Another study showed that complete strangers were more willing to help someone pick up a stack of discs they dropped when they had lightly touched someone when asking for directions beforehand. In all these cases people acted more positively and compassionate after a slight touch.

This might be confusing to quite a few people who highly value their personal space. Some people recoil at the touch of a stranger. Interestingly enough, some of the tests subjects did as well, but generally still acted nicer toward the strangers anyhow.

This has been shown to some extent in non-human mammals as well. Mice and primates also get pleasure from social touch. This is part of the reason for grooming cliques. Grooming effectively takes only about 10 minutes per day, but the cliques tend to groom for hours on end. The reason being it is as much of a social thing as it is a necessity. Touching also can signify confidence and slight dominance.

We have a particular type of nerve fiber - mainly found in our arms and faces - that has developed specifically to infer pleasure from social touch, such as the light arm tap I mentioned above. They are connected to the part of your brain that deals with emotion (the insular cortex), in this case pleasurable emotion. So part of the reason a light touch is so effective is because we are literally wired to glean some sort of pleasure from it, whether we realize it or not.