Sensation E-Book

Thalma Lobel

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In Sensation, leading psychologist Thalma Lobel takes us on a trip around the senses, revealing the amazing extent to which our external environment profoundly shapes our thoughts, emotions and decisions about everything from the people we like to the way we work. She reveals how holding something warm can make us friendlier; how we perceive people as nicer if we know they like sweet foods; how we unconsciously equate height with power, weight with importance, cleanliness with morality. Drawing on evidence from her own studies and those of other leading researchers, Lobel reveals the psychology behind these remarkable findings for the first time to a general readership. She looks in particular at how abstract and physical concepts are linked in the brain, and asks: how can we use this information to our advantage? The answer: we can change people's perceptions of us, disarm aggressive negotiators, boost our creativity and much more, all by harnessing the untapped power of our physical intelligence.

Leseprobe

SENSATION

SENSATION

The New Science of Physical Intelligence

Thalma Lobel

Originally published in the USA in 2014 by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.

First published in the UK in 2014 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.net

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street,

London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in South Africa by

Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,

41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

ISBN: 978-184831-659-1

Text copyright © 2014 by Thalma Lobel

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Interior design by Jill Putorti

Printed and bound in the UK by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

To my beloved son Dani

To my beautiful Danielle, Elinor, Natalie and Dean

Contents

Introduction: The Tangled Web Our Senses Weave

1 Wanna Grab a Drink? How Temperature Affects Us

2 Smooth Operators and Rough Customers: Texture

3 Don’t Take This Lightly: The Importance of Weight

4 Slow Down, Red Ahead: Red and Performance

5 The Lady in Red: Red and Sexual Attraction

6 In Contrast: Separating the Light from the Darkness

7 Space, the Mental Frontier: Physical and Psychological Distance

8 High and Mighty: Vertical Position, Size and Power

9 Out, Damned Spot: Guilt, Morality and Cleaning

10 Sweet Smell of Success: Taste and Smell

11 Turning on Lights Outside the Box: Embodying Metaphors

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Introduction: The Tangled Web Our Senses Weave

In 2005 I travelled with four friends to Guatemala for two weeks. In a great trip filled with many exciting new experiences, the highlight was a visit to Tikal National Park to see archaeological sites dating back to the Mayan civilisation.

In the jungle cottages where we stayed, each of us was given a separate room. My husband was not able to travel with me, so I was alone in the room. There was no electricity from 10.00 p.m. until the morning. Unable to sleep soundly, I awoke at 2.00 a.m. – to utter and total darkness. It was pitch-black. I had no flashlight or cell phone next to my bed, and I saw nothing. Nothing! No distant street lamp, no moonlight, not a star through the window. I could not hear anything either – the jungle around me was completely still. This was the closest I had ever been to sensory deprivation. It was a most unpleasant experience.

At dawn’s first light, I got dressed and ran outside. With the sun on my face, hearing the chatter of birds, I felt reborn! No other person was in sight, but I revelled in the beauty and colours of nature and was delighted when a group of armadillos, an animal I had never before seen, ambled by. I was so grateful that life was not as barren and blank as it had seemed in that dark room. In those brief hours of darkness, I had come to realise, in the most emphatic way, the vital connection between our physical senses and our mental states.

It is crucial for us to be able to sense the external world, but at the other extreme from sensory deprivation is sensory overload, which can come from living and working in a big city. The urban environment is relentless and bustling – scurrying pedestrians, aggressive drivers, lumbering trucks and choking exhaust, kamikaze bike messengers, splashy window displays, the unbroken skyline of hard-edged buildings, the screaming heat and densely packed bodies. I for one love cities like New York, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, where I live, but sometimes even I need to get away from it all – just for a while. Unlike me, other people get agitated by too much stimulation and prefer quieter, more natural landscapes in the suburbs or countryside.

Between these two poles lies an entire spectrum of stimuli. Total sensory deprivation and stimulus bombardment are both bad for us. Yet wherever we are, we are constantly exposed to environmental stimuli and cues. We touch things that have different temperatures and textures, we smell good and bad odours, we see myriad colours, and we lift objects to sense their weight. We experience much of our world quite consciously through our senses. But without noticing it, we are also unconsciously influenced in the most amazing ways by the physical experiences our senses convey.

In this book, I will take you on a systematic tour of our senses and reveal how your sensory experience of the world influences the rational mind you believe you have, as well as the independent thoughts you believe you make. I’ll explain why warm temperatures make us temporarily friendlier and the colour red causes us to perform more poorly on tests. I’ll show that drawing close dots on a Cartesian graph makes us feel more emotionally close to others and that CVs fastened to heavy clipboards make a better, more professional impression. And I’ll demonstrate why clean smells, like that of Windolene, promote cleaning behaviour, while showering before a test is more likely to lead to cheating. In case these statements sound impossible, I have to tell you that these findings have been proven repeatedly in lab experiments and published in some of the best peer-reviewed academic journals in the world. These astonishing facts actually point to a new way of understanding how our minds work. And Sensation presents these studies to you, the general reader, for the first time.

This book is about the way our sensations influence us. Unseen cues that surround us may cause us to lose sleep, fail a test and even fall in love. In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale ‘The Princess and the Pea’, only a princess is sensitive enough to feel a pea placed underneath twenty featherbeds and twenty mattresses. But in fact we are all extraordinarily sensitive to the stimuli in our environment. Like the princess, we may not always know what disturbs us under our radar, but we are nonetheless affected.

Many of the effects of these triggers are short-lived; they ‘glow’ ephemerally in the subconscious for a little while but don’t change us permanently. Yet what is brief is not necessarily unimportant. Our actions under these triggers’ influence can make a significant difference in our effectiveness in business meetings, classrooms and sports. They can affect how we feel on first dates and how we’re perceived in an interview for a job. This book will raise your awareness of these triggers, or ‘peas’, and their effects – on both your own and others’ thoughts and actions.

* * *

My research into effects of their environment on people began, basically, when I was eighteen years old and a soldier in the Israel Defence Forces, where I was stationed in a classified bunker several storeys below ground. I was in my first year at my university, studying psychology, and would work 48-hour shifts at the base so I could leave to attend class, where I would sit through lectures about the human mind under extreme conditions. With a slight sense of irony, I would then return to a metal cave to work without sleep for another two days straight. My life was basically an experiment.

At the base, we lived and worked under relentless fluorescent lights, breathing the same recycled air over and over. We napped in small pitch-black rooms, where, during most of my time underground, I lost track of day and night. Immersed in psychology at the university when I was above ground, I couldn’t help but study every facial expression and odd behaviour of my fellow soldiers whenever I returned to the bunker. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was already fascinated by the way our environments shape and influence us. The world became a lab to me.

I received my degree in clinical psychology and followed it with postdoctoral studies at Harvard. As a professor of psychology, I studied how stereotypes, personality characteristics and culture influence our behaviour, specialising in the psychology of gender identity in both children and adults. I designed interesting experiments that were published in prestigious journals, and I truly loved what I did.

Then, in 2008, I read a study by Laurence Williams and John Bargh in Science.1 They had found that subjects who held warm cups of coffee were more likely to perceive someone else as emotionally ‘warm’. The results of this study, and others like it, seemed almost like science fiction in their revelation of subtle but profound influences on our thoughts, perceptions and judgements. They moved me in a way that no studies ever had before. Reading them reminded me of how, after reading a book about psychoanalysis as a senior in high school, I’d been thrilled to discover the power of the unconscious to influence our minds and bodies. The stories of patients who had suffered from physical symptoms such as paralysis or vision disturbances but were cured by ‘talking techniques’, by becoming aware of unconscious drives that caused their symptoms, had inspired me to become a psychologist. Now here was another kind of revolution in psychology.

But these studies were conducted in a lab, with regular people who did not suffer from any pathological maladies. These new studies examined everyday behaviours, such as interactions with friends, evaluations of job candidates and social judgements. Moreover, the studies did not deal with hidden or deeply suppressed motives, desires and fears that unconsciously influence our behaviour. Rather, they dealt with physical sensations that we experience all the time and that unconsciously influence our behaviours.

Most of us would like to believe that we exert control over our behaviour; so it is somewhat disconcerting to discover that seemingly irrelevant environmental factors and physical sensations affect our behaviour all the time. The findings were counter-intuitive – and so they were alluring to me. I decided to return to research into the association between body and mind, but with this new approach, which is now known as the theory of embodied cognition.

I’d grown up in busy Tel Aviv, but I used to spend summers with my aunt on her kibbutz, which gave me some of my best childhood memories. In those days, living on the kibbutz was like living on another planet – no phones, no cars, just endless fields with houses sprouting up here and there. People were different there, calmer; they even wore different expressions on their faces. Whenever I visited, I noticed that I was different too. We all felt part of a larger landscape and purpose; we were more in touch with the forces of nature and how they ruled our lives and routines. One summer there, I had an epiphany that we are more like sailing boats than motorboats; even though our hands are on the wheel, the unseen force of the wind matters much more than we do. Now, as an adult, after a lifetime of studying the mind, I finally have the science of embodied cognition to show that the little girl in a field was more right than she then knew.

Temperature, texture, weight, sound, taste, smell and colour, among a symphony of other physical sensations, affect us every day. We are moved without knowing we are being moved. We feel ownership of and responsibility for our decisions and actions, yet they are greatly influenced and sometimes created by the sensory world around us.

After 30 years of conducting my own studies, studying the research of others, and teaching thousands of students, I am more inspired than ever by this embodied material. When I teach my graduate students about these recent studies, I can see their surprise. And when my students and I create our own experiments, we surprise ourselves. Several studies, for example, found that people’s moral judgements of others are affected by disgusting tastes. Yet I would venture to guess that you, like most people, feel that your moral values come from deep inner convictions that are unassailable by simple, transient changes in your environment.

I’ll begin by discussing the effects of temperature on our moods and the decisions we make. It turns out there is reason behind why we sometimes blow hot and cold. I believe that you will be as fascinated as my students and I have been with these innovative experiments, the theories behind them, and their implications for your own life.

1

Wanna Grab a Drink? How Temperature Affects Us

If you’ve ever been married, you know the rule: The husband is always to blame. My husband and I have been married for over thirty years and ten years ago decided to sell a small apartment that we owned in Tel Aviv. Although it was a beautiful, white-walled, sunny Bauhaus-style apartment in the city centre, it had become a hassle for us to manage. We had many potential buyers come and go, but one particular newly-wed couple kept coming to see it over and over again. On one visit, they even brought in an architect, who measured and fussed all over the place in a consultation about remodelling. They clearly wanted to buy.

We talked a little about numbers on their visits, but Israelis are notoriously coy negotiators, and we had made it nearly to the signing of the final paperwork without yet agreeing on the price. For what would be our last negotiation, we planned to meet the couple at a mutual friend’s house to talk over tea. I remember clearly that on the way to that meeting, I believed their offer was too low and I planned to make a firm counter-offer. I practised in my head all the ways I would talk about the value of the apartment, its great location and other buyers’ interest in it. After we arrived, our hosts poured us all hot cups of black tea, and within ten minutes I found that I had agreed to the buyers’ original – and too low – offer.

When I came home, I was kicking myself, because I had the feeling that we could have easily gotten more if we had insisted. The couple was clearly very invested. Why had we given up so easily? Naturally, I decided it must have been my husband’s fault. Why hadn’t he argued? Why had we agreed so quickly? Maybe we had just gotten tired of the long negotiation and wanted to be done with it. Maybe we just liked the young couple. Years later, I found out that something far simpler was likely to have played a role: the warm cup of tea.

In 2008, at Yale University, a student named Laurence Williams and his well-known professor John Bargh recruited 41 students for a psychology study.1 One by one, the students were led into a lobby, where they were greeted by a young research assistant who guided them to an elevator that would take them to a laboratory on the fourth floor. As part of the experiment, the assistant had her hands full, carrying a stack of books, a clipboard and a cup of coffee. While in the elevator, she asked the participant to hold her coffee for a second, so she could write his or her name and other information on her clipboard. This casual request was actually the most important part of the experimental procedure. Half of the participants were handed a hot cup of coffee and the other half an iced coffee. This subtly exposed them to different tactile experiences of temperature. Yet they had no idea that what they were being asked to do was significant.

When the participants stepped out of the elevator and into the lab, they were met by another experimenter, who sat them down and asked them to read a description of someone called only Person A, who was characterised as skilful, intelligent, determined, practical, industrious and cautious. Unbeknownst to the participants, Person A was a fictitious composite character. They were then asked to rate Person A from a list of ten additional traits not included in the written description. Half of the traits were on the ‘warm–cold’ spectrum – traits that we might associate with ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ personalities – and were identified by words such as generous or ungenerous, good-natured or irritable, sociable or antisocial, and caring or selfish. The remaining traits were unrelated to the warm–cold aspect and included descriptions such as talkative or quiet, strong or weak, honest or dishonest.

Behold the power of holding a warm cup of coffee. Participants who held the hot cup for a few moments in the elevator rated Person A as significantly more generous, good-natured and caring than did their iced coffee-holding counterparts. People who held the cold cup were far more likely to see Person A as ungenerous, irritable and selfish. Yet they all felt pretty much the same about adjectives unrelated to the warm–cold aspect, no matter which coffee the subjects held before they sat down.

Could the insignificant act of holding a warm cup of coffee in an elevator really make you see the people around you as nicer? What was going on here, psychologically speaking?

This finding that physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth was so surprising that many scientists raised their eyebrows and asked if it could be true. Yet, as you will soon see, temperature influences our reactions to real people just as it affected participants’ initial judgements of anonymous people they only read about. Temperature can even influence our perceptions of intimacy and connection.

Although individuals differ in how much they need intimacy and to what extent they are capable of it, intimacy is an essential component of most relationships. In 2009, two Dutch researchers explored whether temperature could affect how close people thought they were to others.2 As in the coffee experiment, the researchers had participants hold warm or cold beverages. The experimenter asked each participant to hold a beverage for a few minutes while he was pretending to install a questionnaire on the computer.

The experimenter then took the beverages from the participants and asked them to think of a real person they knew and rate how close they were to that person. Participants who were holding a warm beverage perceived the person in mind as closer emotionally to them than did those who were holding a cold beverage. This is surprising because most of us believe that our most intimate connections are stable on a day-to-day basis – we don’t expect them to be influenced by the temperature of the drink we hold.

Yet our minds do not exist in a vacuum, so our feelings and values can be affected by subtle influences around us. Seemingly irrelevant things that we process through our bodies and our physical senses do affect our states of mind, mostly without our awareness. The core theory of embodied cognition, the emergent field of psychology that we’re exploring, states that there is an indissoluble link between our decision making and our sensory-motor experiences, such as touching a warm or cold object, and our behaviours, judgements and emotions.

Conventional psychology historically has been interested in what’s going on inside people’s heads and why they make the mistakes and choices that they do. Psychologists usually study fears, desires, memories, emotions. But what about the external context in which we find ourselves? Especially in a performance situation – a job, an audition, an examination, or a sporting event – the environment outside the contestants’ heads also affects why they succeed or fail. An embodied cognition approach would study how even seemingly insignificant aspects of an audition environment – such as the heat of the stage lights, the colour of the curtains and any bright brand-name logos – might influence performance.

Embodied cognition theory proposes that the mind cannot work separately from the physical world; that the senses provide the bridge to both our unconscious and our conscious thought processes. We psychologists and neuroscientists working in this field seek to show the influence that physical sensations have over our mental states and behaviour.3 The mind-body connection is evident in everything we do.

Read the following passage:

The warmth of his handshake hid the heavy weight of his memories, but he had shot her down in cold blood and would never again sleep with a clean conscience.

This sentence will not win any literary prizes with its awkward mix of metaphors, but let’s look at it closely. The phrases warmth of his handshake, heavy weight of his memories, in cold blood and clean conscience show that our everyday speech is rooted in the connection between our physical experience and our psychological state.4 It’s difficult even to think of an emotion that doesn’t carry with it a physical metaphor: isolation is cold, guilt is heavy, cruelty is hard.

Sensation shows that these relations between physical sensations and emotions and behaviours are real, not just metaphorical. Physical sensations such as warmth, distance, weight and many other subtle sensory experiences can (and do) activate and influence our judgements, emotional experiences and performances. This relationship between physical sensations and psychological experiences, though complex, reveals itself in a very particular way – as in the cold feeling that arises from loneliness.

A Cold, Lonely Night

Changes in temperature are known to affect our moods and behaviour. Pleasant, warm weather improves mood,5 and heat is associated with aggression and crime rates.6 In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Benvolio warns Mercutio of the air of sweltering violence in Verona’s streets. ‘I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire,’ he says. ‘The day is hot, the Capulets abroad, and, if we meet, we shall not ’scape a brawl, for now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.’ The reality of the relationship is, as always, more complex, but the link itself is clear. Some classical psychologists still hold out against this finding, just as hard-liners hold out against the proof of global climate change, but environmental factors affect our mental states and thoughts in profound ways. As it turns out, small talk about the weather may not be so small after all. ‘How about this weather?’ is actually polite code for ‘What’s going on with you?’ The answer to this seemingly innocent question may sometimes influence your judgements and decisions.

My mother used to love to tell this joke: A man and a woman had been dating for fifteen years. One day the woman asked the man, ‘Don’t you think it’s time we got married?’ The man answered, ‘Absolutely, but who would marry us? It’s a cold world out there.’ Of course the woman meant that the two of them should marry, but, as the man points out, it’s hard to find someone to be with. People sometimes use this expression, It’s a cold world out there, when they’re worrying about making bold changes in their lives, such as leaving a spouse or a job. What awaits them might be difficult, scary, or lonely – cold.

A friend once told me a sad little story from her youth. When she was thirteen, she was very excited about going to summer camp with her two best friends. But on the day they were supposed to leave, one of her friends fell ill and the other friend’s family changed their plans; all of a sudden, she had to go to camp alone. Decades later, as we talked over hot tea in Tel Aviv, she recounted how cold she had felt every night that summer. Even though summers in Israel are very warm, her thin blanket wasn’t enough to keep her comfortable. The connection between being lonely and feeling cold exists in many languages, in songs and poetry. Would my friend have experienced the temperature that summer differently if her friends had been there?

In North America, in Toronto, average daytime winter temperatures hover just below freezing. Residents contend with months of snow, ice, slush and serious windchill. This is the appropriate environment in which two researchers from the University of Toronto investigated the connection between being cold and feeling lonely. In two experiments, they examined whether physical temperature affects our psychological states, and also whether our feelings affect our perception of temperature.7

In the first experiment, the researchers asked 32 students to recall a situation in which they felt they were socially excluded and lonely. Think of not being invited to a party, not being asked to play a game with others, et cetera. Another 32 students were asked to think of a situation in which they were socially included, like being accepted into a club. The researchers then intentionally diverted the students’ attention by telling them that the university maintenance staff wanted to know how hot or cold the room was. Would the students please estimate the temperature in the room? The students who recalled being socially excluded actually judged the room as colder than those who had recalled being socially included. The average estimate of those who remembered being excluded was 21.4°C, compared with an average estimate of 24.0°C by those who remembered being included. Yet they all had sat in exactly the same room.

So you see, emotional memories can influence your physical experience in the present. There is a powerful connection – even across time – between coldness and loneliness.

The researchers then wanted to go beyond summoning a memory of loneliness and recreate the experience in the present. So they used a brilliant way of making people feel left out. They invited one group of subjects to play a virtual ball-tossing game. Participants were asked to sit at the computer and play online with three other players at different locations. What they didn’t know was that actually there were no other players; there was only a ‘cruel’ computer program designed to throw the digital ‘ball’ almost exclusively to the fictitious players in order to make the real person feel left out. The second group of participants got to play the same ball-tossing game, but with a computer program that was much less discriminatory in its ball tossing. These actual players received the ball intermittently throughout the game and, not surprisingly, had a much better time.

After the ball-tossing game, both groups were asked to participate in an ostensibly unrelated marketing task, to rate on a scale of 1 to 7 how much they desired five different products: hot coffee, hot soup, an apple, crackers and an icy Coke. Of course, the participants didn’t know that the researchers were in fact interested in the effect of the earlier exclusion, and the researchers found that the ‘excluded’ students were significantly more likely to choose something hot than were the students who were not excluded. They concluded that warmth can be a remedy for loneliness.

Another group of researchers went to a deeper, more somatic level of studying exclusion and examined whether our skin temperature is actually lower when we feel left out.8 They used the same virtual ball-tossing game as in the previous study, and again the computer was programmed for two conditions: inclusion and exclusion. In the inclusion game, participants received the ball every few throws, whereas in the exclusion game they never received the ball. Researchers measured participants’ finger temperature during the experiment and found that participants who were excluded really became colder, and their finger temperatures decreased.

Going even further, the researchers conducted an experiment to answer the question, can holding something warm actually improve the feelings of people who have been excluded? They asked participants to play the same ball-tossing game and again divided them into excluded and included groups. This time, however, the researchers programmed the computer to stop after three minutes and display an alleged ‘error’. When this happened, a researcher arrived at the participants’ station holding a glass containing either cold or warm tea. All the participants requested his assistance, and the researcher then asked each participant to hold the beverage while he fixed the computer. Afterward, participants were asked to choose whether they had felt ‘bad’, ‘tense’, ‘sad’, or ‘stressed’ and to rate their feeling from 1 to 5. I would certainly have predicted that those who had been excluded would report more negative feelings than those who had been included, which was true for these participants. The amazing part of the results is that only those who were excluded and held a cold glass of tea had more negative feelings. For those who were excluded but had held a warm glass, their warm hands had warmed their feelings and, apparently, caused them to feel better.

Taken together, these results clearly show that feeling cold or warm is determined not only by the temperature of the room but also by your mental state. If you feel lonely, whether you are actually excluded from an activity or you are in the same room with individuals who do not share your opinions, choices and views, both your physical experience and your psychological experience actually change. Even if you just stand or sit far from someone or from a group, you feel isolated. The room becomes cold for you. In contrast, if you feel socially accepted, if you are in a room with people who share your opinions and preferences and views, or if you just sit close to someone, you feel that the room is warmer.

These findings have direct implications for how we live and should be especially important to teachers, educators and parents, who try to help children adjust to many situations. For example, children and adolescents sometimes feel lonely or isolated at school, and this feeling can lead to adjustment problems. Now that you know that warm temperatures can positively affect interpersonal interactions, you can help children not to feel as if they have been left out in the cold, and also help others feel warmer towards them. A simple action such as turning up the heat, asking children to put on sweaters, or having children share hot chocolate or hot lunches together can help support a positive interpersonal climate.

A young man I know told me that when he was a teenager his parents sent him to a psychologist to try to improve their relationship with him, but he was so uncomfortable in the doctor’s office that he didn’t even take off his coat for the first four months. It took him that long to warm up even to the psychologist. I myself have gone to a number of parties where I did not know anybody and felt quite lonely when entering the room. Many other people must have felt that way, too, as they didn’t take off their coats either. Whether you’re hosting a meeting or a party, make sure that the room is warm, at least at the beginning of a gathering. Serving warm drinks in a cold season and warm soup as a starter to a dinner might help. Lonely people – or people who are in new, unfamiliar social situations – need psychological warmth as well as physical warmth.

Temperature, Generosity and Trust: Warm Your Hands and Open Your Heart

Could temperature affect more than just our opinions and feelings? Could it actually influence our behaviour? Could your daily ritual of drinking coffee change the likelihood that you would, say, spare some change for someone who asks for help outside your neighbourhood coffee shop? Does your warm morning tea help you start your day with a more open, positive attitude and even help you to trust others more? Williams and Bargh, the researchers at Yale who conducted the experiments with warm cups of coffee, devised a way to find out.9

They told participants that they were conducting a consumer marketing study and gave them a ‘new product’, a therapeutic pad. Participants were asked to hold the pad – which was either hot or cold – for a few moments, then evaluate its effectiveness and indicate whether they would recommend it to friends, family and strangers. But the most important part of the study was actually not the survey but the decision participants were asked to make after it. Individually, participants were given a choice between two rewards for participating in the study: a refreshment for themselves or a small gift certificate in the name of a friend they could choose.

The results were dramatic. Among those who held the cold pad, about 75 per cent chose a reward for themselves and only 25 per cent chose a gift for a friend. Of those who handled and reviewed the hot pad, 54 to 46 per cent chose a gift for a friend. That is a significant statistical difference in giving behaviour. Yet the only factor that was different in the experiment was the temperature of the pad in the participants’ hands.

The results of this experiment reinforce the notion that philanthropy and charitable donations can be more emotional than rational. This is not to say that giving is purely an emotional urge, because of course it contains a large rational component. We are not prone to bouts of careless giving or fits of philanthropy, but we do give for many reasons: we may want to be liked and respected by the recipient; we may want to be perceived as generous in our communities; and we may want to feel important and needed. But this experiment, like most embodied cognition experiments, shows that there is a visceral influence on our actions, even those that we believe come from purely logical thought processes. It also shows that not only is there a significant emotional and subconscious component, but we can be compelled to act by mundane and subtle quotidian forces. In this case, the behaviour was triggered by the most trivial act (holding a therapeutic pad for a few moments).

Williams and Bargh led another investigation into whether holding a warm object would influence trust as well as generosity.10 The bedrock of marriages, friendships and business relationships, trust can be hard-won and delicate, determined by many factors. Why do we build certain trusting relationships and not others? The decision to trust someone can be instantaneous and it can feel intuitive, but a little bit of warmth may help forge this important bond.

Researchers asked participants to hold a therapeutic pack that was either cold (15°C) or hot (41°C) in another supposed consumer product study. Then they had participants play a game in which some acted as investors and others as trustees. The investor decided how much money he or she would send to the trustee, who sat anonymously in the other room. The amount that the investor sent to the trustee was immediately tripled on receipt. Then the trustee had to decide how much money he or she returned. In each round of the game, the investors could invest any amount of money from none to one dollar in ten-cent increments. The more the investor invested, the greater the possibility he or she would get back more money, but only if the trustee chose to return it. Although participants believed they were participating in an investing game, they were really engaging in a test of trust. The more an investor trusted the trustee, the more money he or she would invest.

The results of the study were amazing. Those who touched the cold pack just before the game invested less money compared with those who touched the warm pack. The group with the cold pack did not so easily trust the trustees and were not so sure the trustees would return the investment. Holding a hot therapeutic pack, however, prompted people to feel more intimacy and trust others more readily.

The generosity, trust and intimacy effect of warmth seems to be short-term. Our minds are affected for only a little while by what our bodies feel, but, as I said earlier, what is brief is not necessarily unimportant. A snap judgement can have lasting consequences. The first step towards being able to control and work with these ‘peas and cues’ from our environment – and from other people – is to become aware of them.

Consider that you might be able to improve a first date – or an initial business meeting – by merely giving your companion a warm drink. You might also consider meeting at a Japanese restaurant that offers warm towels before you eat. Whenever you want another person to perceive you as warm or sympathetic, offer him a cup of warm tea or coffee. In negotiations over things such as salary, sales, or divorce, if you want the other side to compromise or show some generosity, you might offer a nice cup of tea or an espresso, rather than a cold soft drink. Doing so just may tip the scales in your favour.

2

Smooth Operators and Rough Customers: Texture

The Book of Genesis tells the story of Esau and Jacob, sons of the patriarch Isaac. As the elder son, Esau, a rough-mannered hunter, was entitled to the birthright or inheritance. Famished after a hunt, however, he sold his right to the blessing to Jacob, who was their mother’s favourite, in exchange for a bowl of stew. When the time came for their aged, blind father to bestow the blessing on Esau, Jacob took his brother’s place and, to deceive his father, wore a goatskin on his arms and neck in order to make them appear hairy like Esau’s. Isaac could rely only on his sense of touch to read the situation, and remarked, ‘The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau’, and gave his blessing to Jacob.

This story demonstrates that not only is tactile perception essential for sensing the physical world but it can help us discern what goes on beneath the surface. Like Isaac, when it comes to figuring out many situations, we all are feeling our way around. The story also warns against depending too much on limited and contradictory sensory input in making an important judgement. It reminds us to question what our senses tell us when we’re getting mixed messages, not to rely on assumptions or faith alone but to use our heads. And of course it also cautions us about putting more importance on an immediate, fleeting gratification, like a meal, than on the future satisfaction we would derive from a greater purpose or accomplishment, as Esau did when he allowed his stomach’s physical desire to usurp his inheritance. ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive,’ wrote Walter Scott. Beware of entangling yourself in complicated situations. By relying on what your senses tell you, you may actually be deceiving yourself.

Our senses provide important information, vital to our survival, but we need to be conscious of the mixed messages they can convey and evaluate them with discernment.

Stories as well as metaphors alert us to the traps our senses can lay for us. Jacob was able to use embodied cognition to his advantage; Isaac surrendered his reason to his senses for a brief but crucial moment and changed the course of biblical history. Discerning the truth of a situation and of another person’s motives (whether that person is aware of them or not) can be a challenge. The ‘truth’ is what we think we perceive through our senses and run through our minds, both consciously and unconsciously. Our verbal expressions represent our thoughts. Rough day, soft-hearted, smooth sailing, a hard time, a soft landing, a hard bargainer, rough manners – all these metaphors involve tactile sensations and perceptions. But are these just random flourishes in our language, or does their existence connect to something deep in our nature?

The answer, it turns out, is skin-deep – and deeper. The human body’s largest, most sensitive organ is the skin. It covers us entirely, from the delicate fingertips of a jazz pianist to the hardened soles of a fire walker. We want to ‘stay in touch’ with our loved ones, which usually means to stay in communication rather than in literal physical touch. The Gospel of Mark says that for Jesus to touch a person spiritually, that person must be willing to reach out and touch Jesus. Why is it not enough simply to see and hear Jesus to be affected by him? Of course generations who have come after Jesus lived have been touched through his words, but to the first followers the embodiment of his spirit in his person and the ability to touch and be touched by the spirit made flesh were compelling. To this day, we use touch-related words so often in language because touch is the most intimate way to experience and connect with the world.

Scientists have theorised that we used non-verbal communication, including touch, long before we used language. We begin progressing from non-verbal to verbal communication as soon as we are born. Through the touch of their parents and caregivers – hugs and kisses, nursing and holding – infants learn about the world around them. Psychologists have demonstrated the importance of touch in child development. Touch enhances feelings of security in children and improves their social skills. In famous, tragic cases of children who grew up in orphanages in Romania with hardly any human contact, the lack of touch stunted their emotional, social and cognitive development.1

Touch also influences adults’ behaviour, such as compliance, altruism and risk taking. In one study salespeople in a supermarket approached shoppers and asked them to taste a new snack. While making the request they touched some of the shoppers lightly on the upper arm. That touch increased shoppers’ willingness to try a sample and even to buy the snack.2 A recent study found that a light tap on the shoulder increased financial risk taking in people, probably due to a resulting sense of enhanced security.3 Another study found that waitresses who touched customers on the hand or on the shoulder for about a second received greater tips.4 Yet the same brief touch did not influence customers’ ratings of the waitresses or their ratings of the atmosphere of the restaurant; this suggests that the customers were not aware of the effect of the touch on their behaviour.

Touching another human being increases trust and cooperation. It reduces our perception of threat, increases our sense of security and relaxes us. Anxious people benefit from touching someone or holding hands. When people go to the doctor to have a potentially painful procedure, a light touch on the head or shoulders by a health-care provider can reduce their anxiety. A massage after a hard day at work helps me relax, even if my muscles are not particularly tense and I am not especially anxious.

The need to be touched has led scientists to try to design and create products that mimic the feeling of human touch. The ‘hug shirt’, for instance, communicates the sensation of touch for people who are physically separated: it is made of soft, pleasant-feeling materials and has sophisticated pressure sensors that are activated by various technologies such as mobile phone applications.5 It even stimulates the emotional reactions that follow a hug, such as a decreased heart rate. Another invention uses a doll that transmits a hugging sensation to a child wearing a special ‘cyberpyjama’.6 People are willing to spend time and money to ‘stay in touch’ with technological innovations as well as with the old-fashioned long embrace after being apart.

Our tactile sensations are not limited to human touch. We experience tactile sensations all the time, often without even noticing them. We sense softness, hardness, roughness and smoothness from wearing clothes and holding books, bags, computers, smartphones and iPads. We sense that cushions, pillows and chairs are hard or soft at home, in the office and in restaurants. We lie down at the end of the day on a bed whose softness or hardness we’ve chosen. We dry ourselves with our fluffy or rough towels, and at Pilates and yoga classes we exercise on thin or cushiony mats.

We also use tactile descriptions metaphorically. For example, rough describes a difficult, unpleasant situation or stretch of time, as the corresponding physical touch of a rough object can be uneven or harsh. We use the word soft when we describe someone who is easy to get along with or who can be easily moulded, like a soft, yielding substance. In contrast, hard is used to describe a rigid, difficult person who, like an unyielding material, cannot readily be changed.

Metaphors represent a deeper connection between our physical sensations and our behaviours and judgements. Several researchers examined whether metaphors such as hard and soft