Post-compliance touch: an incentive for task performance.

Abstract

That a brief touch increases compliance to a request is well documented, but the effect of touch after compliance has already been obtained has not been investigated. The current experiment tested the effects of post-compliance touch on subjects' willingness to respond to items on a lengthy and difficult survey. A total of 104 women and 94 men, approached at random in an American university student union, agreed to participate in a survey of social attitudes. Subjects rated their amount of agreement or disagreement with 150 statements about social issues such as discrimination, abortion, euthanasia, politics, and religion. The effects of touch were assessed in two ways: by the number of survey items completed and the nature of these responses. Results indicated that both male and female subjects who were touched completed significantly more items than nontouched subjects, but there was no difference in the nature of their responses.