Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Our measure of interest, represented in the table below, was the proportion of participants selecting the appropriate term to label the touch. As you can see, people can reliably communicate well-studied emotions such as anger, disgust, or fear with a one-or two-second touch of another’s forearm. Quite astonishing, really, was how well strangers could communicate sympathy, love, and gratitude with one-second touches to a stranger’s forearm. Just as interesting were the emotions that our participants could not readily communicate with touch, such as embarrassment and pride, which are founded upon a sense of how others regard the self.

       

PRIMARY CHOICE                

SECONDARY CHOICE                

WELL-STUDIED EMOTIONS                                

ANGER        

57        

DISGUST        

15        

DISGUST        

63        

ANGER        

10        

FEAR        

51        

ANGER        

14        

SADNESS        

16        

SYMPATHY        

35        

SURPRISE        

24        

FEAR        

17        

HAPPINESS        

30        

GRATITUDE        

21        

SELF-CONSCIOUS EMOTIONS                                

EMBARRASSMENT        

18        

DISGUST        

16        

ENVY        

21        

DISGUST        

12        

PRIDE        

18        

GRATITUDE        

25        

PRO-SOCIAL EMOTIONS                                

LOVE        

51        

SYMPATHY        

28        

GRATITUDE        

55        

SYMPATHY        

16        

SYMPATHY        

57        

LOVE        

17

Humans can communicate emotion with one-second touches to the forearm.

We replicated this study in Spain, known as a high-touch culture, and, our participants were a bit better able to decode emotions through touch.

Our study also involved all possible gender combinations—women touching women and men, and men touching women and men. Here we found two gender differences that speak volumes about the different planets women and men are claimed to originate from. The female participants’ attempts to communicate anger via touch to the male touchees were a failure. The male participants had no idea what the females were doing, and the males’ judgment data amounted to a random collection of guesses at what the women were trying to convey. A woman’s anger does not seem to penetrate the skin of a man. Regrettably, it gets worse. The male participants’ attempts to communicate sympathy to the females were absolutely unintelligible to the females; the males’ attempts at sympathy fell on deaf skin, so to speak.

When we coded what people were doing when touching to communicate the different emotions, we documented behavior that traces back in evolutionary time to our hominid predecessors. Sympathy was conveyed most regularly with a soothing, slow stroke to the arm, no doubt designed to trigger maximal activation in those Merkel cells in the epidermis, generating neural impulses directed toward compassion regions of the brain and nervous system. Gratitude, very interestingly, was reliably signaled in a firm clasp of the forearm, adorned with a slight but clear shake of reassurance.

Sympathy and gratitude are central players in the social contract, motivating actions in the service of others. These are not recent arrivals in evolutionary history or contrivances of a particular culture. They are emotions that are embodied in tactile exchanges that have been honed by thousands of generations of hominid evolution, so that today, with a simple touch to the forearm, the receiver of the touch can discern sympathy from gratitude from love.

HOOPS AND PEDICURES

 

Five minutes at the chimpanzee compound at your local zoo will reveal how pervasive touch is. You’ll see mothers grooming their babies, alpha males picking at the hair of close competitors; two cavorting juveniles, ricocheting around the branches, suddenly stop their antics to groom. In fact, primatologists estimate that chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, devote upwards of 20 percent of their waking hours to grooming. Grooming is so vital to the primate slow loris, Nycticebus tardigradus, that this species has evolved a single nail, known as the toilet claw (in the etymology of toilet, “toilette” came first, and referred to a room to groom in), which evolved to enable frequent grooming.

The first interpretation of the prevalence of grooming in primates, sound and intuitive, was that they were simply ridding one another of parasites, thus enhancing the chances of physical survival. No doubt the need to get rid of bacteria and virus-infested parasites got primates grooming in the first place. Observant primatologists, however, were quick to document episodes of grooming that did not fit the parasite thesis. Primates groom to play, to reconcile, to soothe, to get close, and prior to copulation, with no visible intention of finding parasites. More convincingly, primates groom regularly when there are no known parasites in the physical environment.

This led Robin Dunbar to observe that perhaps grooming is like human gossip. Grooming is a casual exchange of daily living that bonds individuals to one another. It is a glue of our social relations. And so it is with human touch: Touch spreads goodwill, cooperation, and trust.