Greeting a stranger with a hug rather than a handshake could make them like you more, study claims
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By VICTORIA ALLEN, SCIENCE EDITOR
Published: | Updated:
When meeting someone new for the first time, many people offer a polite handshake.
But a hug may actually encourage new acquaintances to like you more, a study suggests.
A team of 18 researchers greeted 330 strangers with either a hug, a handshake or no touch at all, then asked the strangers if they wanted to see their holiday pictures.
People's willingness to look at the holiday snaps was a secret way of judging how much they liked the person who had just hugged - or not hugged - them.
Among people who received a hug from the person they'd just met, 76 per cent were willing to look at their holiday pictures.
Among those who were not hugged, only 52 per cent said yes to looking at the photos from the trip. Professor Karen Dobkins, senior author of the study from the
Department of Psychology at the University of California San Diego, said: 'From when we are babies, at every stage of our lives, we are evolutionarily programmed to feel safe and secure when we experience human touch.
'So if you hug someone you don't know, that could make them feel these positive feelings, and a sense of warmth towards you.
'A hug is a very simple, non-verbal way to connect with someone, and these results suggest it could actually encourage people to like you more.
'The findings could be useful for people meeting friends of friends, or their partners' parents for the first time, who want to make a good impression.
'A friendly hug could be the way to go, as a handshake may just be too formal to build intimacy between people in the same way.'
The study, published in the journal Social Influence, was designed to reveal people's feelings towards someone who had hugged them without actually asking them. The psychologists approached 943 people and asked if they'd like to join a study about touch.
Among the 358 who said yes, around a third received a handshake from the researcher. Around a third were given a hug - after the psychologist asked if he or she could hug them - and the rest were not touched at all.
As a decoy, so people didn't guess the true purpose of the study, they were asked to fill out a questionnaire with general questions about hugging, like how often they gave hugs, which lasted up to 10 minutes.
But the true purpose of the study was to see how much people liked the researchers.
This was measured by an apparently throwaway remark made when people handed in their questionnaires, when the researcher asked if they wanted to see some holiday pictures from a recent trip to Serbia.
The idea was that people who liked the researcher would be more likely to say yes, to look at more photos of landscapes and crowds from Serbia, and to look at the picture slideshow for longer.
The research found people who received hugs liked the person they'd just met more, based on the number of holiday pictures they were willing to view.
That was the case regardless of whether the hug lasted one second or three seconds, and whether it involved patting or not - all types of hug were used in the experiment.
But people not hugged - who either received a handshake or nothing - appeared to like the person less, viewing significantly fewer pictures. The questionnaire used in the study had one important question - it asked how much people had enjoyed the hug from the researcher if they got one.
People who enjoyed the hug more, on a scale of one to five, were more interested in seeing the hugger's holiday pictures.
Professor Dobkins said: 'Previous studies have found that frequent hugs are linked to lower rates of viral infections, and that women's physical responses to stress are reduced when they are hugged by their male partners.
'Couples instructed to cuddle more show greater relationship satisfaction than those simply told to spend more time together. A hug is extremely powerful.'
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