Subliminal

young woman to approach. If the woman handed over her number, they’d tell her the proposition was all in the name of science, at which time, according to the scientists, most of the women laughed. The key to the experiment was this: with half the women they propositioned, the young men added a light one-second touch to the woman’s forearm. The other half received no touch.

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’Ocean? Probably not. But on the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.

Unlike non-Euclidean geometry, touch research has many obvious applications.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹

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.²⁰ The Berkeley researchers studied the sport of basketball, which both requires extensive second-by-second 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.²¹ “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.”²²

To primatologists, the importance of touch is no surprise. Nonhuman primates touch each other extensively during grooming. And while grooming is ostensibly about hygiene, it would take only about ten minutes of grooming a day for an animal to stay clean. Instead, some species spend hours on it.²³ Why? Remember those grooming cliques? In nonhuman primates, social grooming is important for maintaining social relationships.²⁴ Touch is our most highly developed sense when we are born, and it remains a fundamental mode of communication throughout a baby’s first year and an important influence throughout a person’s life.²⁵

AT A QUARTER to eight on the evening of September 26, 1960, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy strode into the studio of the CBS affiliate WBBM in downtown Chicago.²⁶ He appeared rested, bronzed, and fit. The journalist Howard K. Smith would later compare Kennedy to an “athlete come to receive his wreath of laurel.” Ted Rogers, the TV consultant to Kennedy’s Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, remarked, “When he came into the studio I thought he was Cochise, he was so tan.”

Nixon, on the other hand, looked haggard and pale. He had arrived fifteen minutes before Kennedy’s grand entrance. The two candidates were in Chicago for the first presidential debate in U.S. history. But Nixon had recently been hospitalized for a knee infection, which still plagued him. Then, ignoring advice to continue resting, he’d resumed a grueling cross-country campaign schedule and had lost considerable weight. As he climbed out of his Oldsmobile, he suffered from a 102 degree fever, yet he insisted he was well enough to go through with the debate. When judged by the candidates’ words, Nixon was indeed destined to hold his own that night. But the debate would proceed on two levels, the verbal and the nonverbal.

The issues of the day included the conflict with communism, agriculture and labor problems, and the candidates’ experience. Since elections are high-stakes affairs and debates are about important philosophical and practical issues, the candidates’ words are all that should matter, right? Would you be swayed to vote against a candidate because a knee infection had made him look tired? Like voice and touch, posture, facial appearance, and expression exert a powerful influence on how we judge people. But would we elect a president based on demeanor?

CBS’s debate producer, Don Hewitt, took one look at Nixon’s gaunt face and immediately heard alarm bells. He offered both candidates the services of a makeup artist, but after Kennedy declined, so did Nixon. Then, while an aide rubbed an over-the-counter cosmetic called Lazy Shave over Nixon’s famously heavy five o’clock shadow, out of their view Kennedy’s people proceeded to give Kennedy a full cosmetic touch-up. Hewitt pressed Rogers, Nixon’s TV consultant, about his candidate’s appearance, but Rogers said he was satisfied. Hewitt then elevated his concern to his boss at CBS. He, too, approached Rogers but received the same response.

Some seventy million people watched the debate. When it was over, one prominent Republican in Texas was heard to say, “That son of a bitch just cost us the election.” That prominent Republican was in a good position to know. He was Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Richard Nixon’s running mate. When the election was held, some six weeks later, Nixon and Lodge lost the popular vote by a hair, just 113,000 out of the 67,000,000 votes cast. That’s less than 1 vote in 500, so even if the debate had convinced just a small percentage of viewers that Nixon wasn’t up to the job, it would have been enough to swing the election.

What’s really interesting here is that, while viewers like Lodge were thinking that Nixon did horribly, a slew of other prominent Republicans had a completely different experience. For example, Earl Mazo, the national political correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune—and a Nixon supporter—attended a kind of debate party with eleven governors and members of their staffs, all in town for the Southern Governors Conference in Hot Springs, Arkansas.²⁷ They thought Nixon did splendidly. Why was their experience so different from Lodge’s? They had listened to the debate over the radio, because the television broadcast was delayed by one hour in Arkansas.

Of the radio broadcast, Mazo said, “[Nixon’s] deep, resonant voice conveyed more conviction, command, and determination than Kennedy’s higher-pitched voice and his Boston-Harvard accent.” But when the television feed came, Mazo and the governors switched to it and watched the first hour again. Mazo then changed his mind about the winner, saying, “On television, Kennedy looked sharper, more in control, more firm.” A Philadelphia commercial research firm, Sindlinger & Co., later confirmed that analysis. According to an article in the trade journal