‘Touches’ of Class May Lead to New Sales and Keeping an Old Habit or Two
Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen Parker wrote a fascinating column yesterday about a newly released study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The study reported that “dimensions of touch—that of weight, texture and hardness—can unconsciously influence judgments and decisions about unrelated events, situations and objects.”
“What we touch unconsciously influences how we think,” said Joshua Ackerman, an assistant professor of marketing at MIT and the lead person on the study. “In situations where evaluations and decisions really matter, we need to pay attention to our physical surroundings and, in particular, how we engage these surroundings through our sense of touch.”
Findings included:
1) shoppers gained better understandings and more confident impressions about products with which they physically interacted;
2) resumes placed on heavy clipboards were rated higher than those on light ones;
3) completing a puzzle with rough pieces makes us more adversarial than completing one with smooth pieces;
4) sitting on harder chairs or car seats may lead us to making stricter decisions.
Back to Parker. She wrote that “the implications are significant. How we literally feel things can influence everything from our choices when voting to spending money and interacting with others.”
Pointing out an interesting quirk in our online existence, she wrote, “Admit it: You print out the stories you really want to study. Think, too, how differently we consider a handwritten letter vs. an e-mail. Even an e-mail printed out seems more important—more concrete—than what we view on the screen. It is, alas, more human…
“Reaching out and touching someone has become easier than ever, but we never really make contact. Hunkered over our keyboards, tapping and clicking messages to the vast Other, we have become a universe of lone rangers keeping the company of our own certitude.”
This, of course, is what makes conferences, roundtables and chapter meetings so important. They give us that chance to connect, to reach out and touch, so to speak—establish a bond. And perhaps there’s more to keeping an old print product alive than just nostalgia. Maybe it can provide a certain tactile presence to balance the amorphous nature of our online products.
Said Ackerman: “I find it amazing that subtle actions like touching sandpaper or sitting in a hard chair can have such an influence over very important decisions, such as which candidate we’re willing to hire, how generous we are, and how much we’re willing to pay for big ticket purchases. Our hands, we’ve learned, manipulate our minds as well as our environments. Perhaps the use of such ‘tactile tactics’ will represent the next advance in social influence and communication.”
Interestingly, I read Parker’s column last night at home—in the physical Washington Post—and brought it into the SIPA office today to write about. Of course, that has something to do with my middle-aginess, but as the study says, there has to be more to it. Would I have given it such heft if I read it online last night, or would have I just gone on to the next big thing, be it World Cup, Lebron, my Facebook friends or an iPad review?
What does this all mean for SIPA members? Obviously, there’s no turning back. But it does make one think a little perhaps about the type of chairs we’re sitting on or, more substantively, keeping something of the print variety, even if it’s just a page or postcard.
“We are all part of this immense digital experiment and we know not where it leads,” wrote Parker. “But the tactile vacuum inherent in the medium can’t be insignificant.”
Pretty heavy stuff for a short week.
—Ronn Levine
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