The Moral Molecule

Neuroscience and economic behavior

Paul J. Zak is a neuroeconomist and director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. See full bio

October 5, 2008, Behavioral Economics

Comments on "Handshake or Hug? Why We Touch"

Handshake or Hug? Why We Touch

By Paul J. Zak on October 5, 2008 in The Moral Molecule

In the last several months, I've moved several colleagues from the handshake greeting to the hug. For my colleague Mark, it happened after the series of long intensive days working on a new project several weeks ago. Somehow that all that time together made shaking hands seem too trivial. Still, it can be a bit uncomfortable to initiate a hug. Read More

How did you rule out the

Submitted by John R on October 5, 2008 - 10:40pm.

How did you rule out the possibility that participants weren't just, in effect, paying for their massage?

Great question! If

Submitted by Paul Zak on October 6, 2008 - 8:29am.

Great question! If participants were expressing gratitude to the researchers for the massage, then decison-maker 1's behavior should also have been affected, but it was not. Only decision-maker 2s showed a behavioral effect of massage. In addition, the change in oxytocin strongly predicted the extent of monetary sacrifice in decision-maker 2s. If this was "gratitude" why would oxytocin predict behavior? Lastly, we took many precautions like shielding identities to mitigate the experimenter effect. Indeed,our analysis showed that we changed the oxytocin release patterns for those who were massaged, suggested a true physiologic cause for the resultant change in behavior. See the original article for details at www.neuroeconomicstudies.org

"I thought I would

Submitted by Anonymous on May 11, 2009 - 2:09am.

"I thought I would investigate this a couple years ago. My real interest was to find out if touching would somehow make people "nicer," especially towards strangers. But I couldn't crack the lawsuit problem: if I asked participants in an experiment to touch each other, surely someone would be touched inappropriately and I would get sued. And for most of us, being forced to touch someone is weird and uncomfortable. Touch needs to be freely given and accepted to have a positive effect.

So, what to do? Many of the experiments I run involve blood draws, and I noticed that when one has a white lab coat on it is easy and acceptable to comfort a nervous person with a touch on the shoulder. Then it hit me: clinicians can touch us in a caring way and it doesn't bother us."

So what you're saying, Paul, is that you couldn't do the experiment in scientifically rigorous controlled conditions, like an adult, so you put on your "Stand Back - I'm doing SCIENCE!" shirt and pretended to do a scientifically rigorous controlled experiment with meaningful objective results, without actually doing so.

And you're drawing inferences from that which are -- surprise -- not valid.

Presumably you call yourself a "neuroeconomist" so that nobody inadvertently mistakes you for someone who knows what they're talking about and is involved with real science. Even if that's not actually the reason, I appreciate the courtesy that such a designation makes it easy to tell the difference.