Consider this choice: I will give you 20 dollars for certain or I will give you a lottery ticket with a 50/50 chance of winning either 40 dollars or receiving nothing. Which one would you prefer?
Now reconsider the above choice, but imagine a female research assistant has just touched your shoulder blade in a soft encouraging way; leaving her hand there for just a mere second before I gave you the above choice to contemplate upon. Does the lottery ticket look more attractive now?
Quite possibly this thought-experiment doesn't make you feel any different about the hypothetical choice, but according to a study set to appear in the journal psychological science, in a real-life experimental lab setting (totally intended!) the touch of a female experimenter might very well influence your willingness to engage in financial risk:
The first in the published series of experiments pointing towards this linkage between touch and risk-taking, is basically the real life counterpart to the thought experiment above. One half of the 67 people in the experiment (yep, they totally split one person in half!) were touched by a female research assistant (who was blind to the hypothesis) while the other half went without being touched and both groups were then asked to state their preferences between a series of choices similar to the one at the beginning of this post.
When comparing how often participants chose risky alternatives over sure outcomes, the two groups differed significantly from each other; with participants who had been touched selecting risky alternatives on average 6.47 times, compared to an average of 4.1 times among non-touched participants.
Backed by this finding, the researchers - Jonathan Levav and Jennifer J. Argo - hypothesized that the effect of this kind of touch by a woman is to increase peoples' sense of security, and therefore makes them more willing to go out on a limb with the financial choice. [This is very much in accord with other psychological research on the importance of physical touch and its effects on psychological well-being, child development and even NBA basketball success.] To further inquire into this mediation hypothesis, the experimenters therefore ran a second experiment with some slight modifications: Participants in the second experiment now were given the choice of investing 5 Canadian dollars into a safe, 4% fixed interest yielding, bond, or investing the money into a stock with uncertain return. One half of the participants in this experimenter were greeted by a female research assistant, and the other half by a male research assistant. Each research assistant would go on to either shake a participant's hand, touch his or her shoulder, or not touch the participant at al.
The effects of these different treatments are depicted in the chart below:
As visible in the graph, the likelihood of a participant's choosing of the risky stock option (rather than the safe bond) was for all statistical purposes equal in the different touch conditions when the greeting experimenter was male. However, when the experimenter was female, a hand shake increased risk taking over not being touched, and a touch on the shoulder increased risk taking even further. The effect was significant regardless of the participant's sex. [Interestingly enough the control condition for the male experimenter appears significantly larger than that for the female condition...any idea what might be going on here?].
Subsequent responses to a series of mood and security measures indicate that the different touching conditions had no influence on participants' mood, but that the different type of touch conditions significantly influenced subjects' sense of security when the touch came at the hand of the female experimenter. Again, a graph says more than a thousand words:
The statistical findings are of course controlled for sex (i.e. the relation between touch and risk-taking held for male and female participants alike) and the paper reports a third supporting experiment that I'll leave for you to read yourself.
In conclusion the studies' authors note having found an
"association between certain kinds of physical contact and financial risk taking."
And that
"[t]his association was observed despite the subtlety of the manipulation: a momentary touch on the shoulder."
They suggest that
" a simple pat on the back of the shoulder-by a female-in a way that connotes support may evoke feelings that are similar to the sense of security afforded by a mother's comforting touch in infancy. Although the comfort in the case of our studies was illusory, the data indicate that our participants perceived a real sense of security and that it led them to take greater financial risk than untouched participants did"
One final thing that ABSOLUTELY needs to be mentioned in connection to this study is this...
Main Reference: Jonathan Levav, & Jennifer Argo (2010). Physical Contact and Financial Risk Taking Psychological Science : 10.1177/095679761039493
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<Cross posted with Ingenious Monkey>
