Touch,compliance, and interpersonal affect

This study investigated the effects of touch on compliance to a help request. The experimenter's initiation of touch during the request did increase compliance as measured by time spent scoring bogus personality inventories. The hypothesized role of attraction in mediating the touch-compliance link was not supported. Instead, touch may have served to indicate status or power differences that influenced subjects to comply. A sex of subject × sex of experimenter interaction was manifested in female subjects complying more to female experimenters than did subjects in any other sex pairing.The authors would like to thank James Daly and Kay McIntyre for their help in conducting this study. Completion of this project was supported by Weldon Spring Research Grant from the University of Missouri to the first author.