FABLES THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE DEPICTED HUMANS with magical powers of touch. The Greek myth of King Midas describes a king who could turn to gold any object—food, drink, rivers, roses—by touching it. The Greeks depicted Apollo’s son Asclepius, god of medicine, as able to cure ailing people by touching them. The Bible’s New Testament depicted Jesus Christ as also capable of healing the sick through mere contact with them. One notable passage describes Jesus’ healing powers, stating that by touching the “hem of his garment,” an ailing woman was “made whole” within the hour. Several Christian saints as well as English and French monarchs from the late Middle Ages through the nineteenth century similarly believed their touch possessed healing powers. As a result, they practiced “royal touch,” a ceremony of touching their subjects with intent to cure them of illnesses such as tuberculosis or rheumatism.
Modern behavioral science has shown that the magic of touch is not only reserved for mythical Greek heroes, European monarchs, saints, or Jesus Christ. Consider Andre Roberson, a small forward for the Oklahoma City Thunder professional basketball team and a self-professed hugger. “I give hugs around the building when they’re needed,” Roberson has stated. “Somebody’s feeling down, I go over there and cheer them up.”1 When reporters once observed Roberson emotionally hugging his coaches after a film session, rumors spread that the Thunder had traded Roberson and he was saying his goodbyes. No, it turned it out Roberson just likes hugging, and this penchant for touch turns out to improve on-court performance as well.
Research by psychologists Michael Kraus and Dacher Keltner showed that National Basketball Association (NBA) teams that touch each other more frequently earlier in the season—for example, hugging, back-patting, butt-slapping, and high-fiving—perform better later in the season. Kraus and Keltner carefully watched games by all NBA teams during the first two months of the 2008–9 season and coded the teams for how often they touch each other. They then used these “touch scores” to predict team performance and cooperation, which they quantified by combining these cooperative on-court behaviors: passing the ball to a teammate who was less closely guarded by an opposing player, setting screens, or pointing and gesturing to a teammate.
Kraus and Keltner’s analyses showed that teams that touched more often earlier in the season exhibited more cooperation, which in turn predicted later season team performance. In other words, touch signaled an intention to cooperate, and cooperation spurred team success. These same effects of human contact on cooperation appear in studies that show just lightly touching another person increases that person’s willingness to sign a petition.2 Touching a person lightly also encourages that person to return a dime that someone left in a phone booth (remember those?).3 A brief touch by a waitress can even cause customers to tip more.4
Human touch also can also soothe another’s pain. Take a fascinatingly unpleasant study by psychologist James Coan and colleagues, who administered electric shocks to sixteen married women while scanning their brains.5 Unsurprisingly, these shocks activated brain regions such as the anterior cingulate cortex that commonly respond to threat, pain, and negative affect. These women also reported how painful the shocks were and, sure enough, they rated them to be reasonably unpleasant. The more interesting findings resulted from an experimental manipulation introduced at various points during the study. Throughout the brain scan, participants received the shock while (a) holding the hand of their husband, (b) holding the hand of a male stranger, or (c) not holding anyone’s hand. Touching another person’s hand reduced brain activity in the threat-sensitive brain regions and reduced reports of unpleasantness. The shock levels were the same, but participants perceived them differently. Remarkably, even a stranger’s touch had this calming effect, but husbands’ hands provided the greatest analgesic; this was particularly true when participants’ self-reported marital satisfaction was high.
In more recent work, psychologist Sarah Master and colleagues showed that holding a romantic partner’s hand reduced the experience of pain from exposure to extreme heat and that this effect was greater than holding a stranger’s hand.6 It also turns out that some partners are more effective than others. Follow-up work demonstrated that holding a male partner’s hand is particularly effective at reducing pain when that partner reports himself to be highly empathic.7 These findings demonstrate that a loving hand is a powerful analgesic and that human touch can alleviate physical pain.
The research described in this chapter so far demonstrates that human touch has seemingly magical powers because it signals social support and cooperative intent. Yet human touch can do more than establish social bonds. Human touch, and in some cases, mere human presence can enhance the value of material things, experiences, and products. Humans generate meaning because they signal effort, intentionality, and authenticity through association.
During graduate school, my weekly Sunday routine involved visiting a neighborhood staple, Valois, where the motto is “See Your Food.” Valois was one of the few venues that brought the Hyde Park neighborhood together, with churchgoers, students, families, and even President Barack Obama every so often congregating to the counter-service cafeteria. At Valois, customers queue efficiently, ordering whatever they like—in my case, eggs, French toast, bacon, breakfast potatoes, coffee, and lemonade (a meal intended to last until evening)—while observing the cooks prepare each item. Customers slide down the line in perfect single file and meet the cashier at the end, along with their food. Although the food itself is excellent comfort fare, the procedure is what makes the experience so enjoyable.
A field experiment conducted by operations professor Ryan Buell and colleagues sheds light on the Valois experience.8 Buell recruited customers at a university dining hall to participate in an experiment in exchange for a free sandwich. Buell randomly assigned some customers to order a sandwich for the following day and observe workers preparing their sandwiches that following day before paying. He assigned other customers simply to order a sandwich and then pick it up the following day without observing workers preparing their sandwiches. When customers observed the sandwich-making process, they reported enjoying their food more because they could see the effort the human workers put into preparing it. Even though participants who watched the workers had to wait longer for their food (sometimes four times as long as others), they preferred their experience. Precisely because of this waiting period, they appreciated the human work behind the sandwich and enjoyed their food more as a result.
Our tendency to value food based on human effort that produced it reflects a broader tendency referred to as the effort heuristic. The effort heuristic is a rule of thumb whereby people consciously or subconsciously judge the value of something based on the perceived effort put into it. The first studies examining this effect, led by psychologist Justin Kruger (of Dunning-Kruger Effect fame), demonstrated that people valued poems, paintings, and medieval armor more highly when they believed these artifacts required more human effort to produce.9 For example, when participants learned that an artist named Deborah Kleven (a name invented for the experiment) spent four hours painting one work of art and twenty-six hours painting another work of art, they reported that the more effortful work was of higher quality and would sell for more money. Indeed, art historians suggest that one reason why experts so value the Mona Lisa is because of Leonardo da Vinci’s painstaking use of sfumato, an effortful painting technique that gradually melds colors rather than using clear lines to separate them. People find value in this effort.
So predominant is this tendency to equate human effort with value that two of history’s most famous social theorists anticipated it, despite agreeing on little else. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, preeminent architects of capitalism and socialism, respectively, endorsed a version of what is known as “the labor theory of value.” Smith noted that “labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities,” suggesting that a capitalistic society enables humans to attain wealth through their own efforts rather than through predetermined natural resources or treasure bestowed to one group or another.10 Marx viewed this equating of value with labor to be precisely the problem with capitalism. He noted that “the worker not only replaces what he consumes but gives to the accumulated labor a greater value than it previously possessed.”11 Marx suggested that capitalists exploit workers by essentially taking this value (and therefore wealth) from the people who expended the labor in the first place. Although scholars debate how consistently and strongly both Smith and Marx held this view that labor produces value, both captured how people infer significance from the human effort spent on producing a commodity.
Not only does human effort produce value, but so can mere human intention as well. Psychologist Ellen Winner and colleagues demonstrated the importance of intention for value in examining an issue that plagues modern art: whether people distinguish between art made by humans compared to art made by animals such as elephants and chimpanzees.12 Although the results of these studies might seem obvious given this book’s thesis regarding the importance of human beings, collectors have shown surprising interest in artwork by nonhumans, suggesting that animal artwork has its own unique value. In 2005 at London’s Bonhams auction house, an Andy Warhol painting and a Renoir sculpture attracted so little attention that they were withdrawn from auction while a relatively lesser known artist, Congo, sold three paintings for £14,400. In fact, Congo was a chimpanzee who died in 1964 of tuberculosis at ten years of age. Congo rose to such fame during his brief life that Picasso, Miró, and Dalí all purchased work from him, with Dalí remarking, “The hand of the chimpanzee is quasihuman; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!”13
In Winner’s studies, she and her colleagues examined whether Congo is an anomaly or whether people more broadly appreciate animal art. They presented participants including both art students and non–art students with pairs of artworks—one created by a professional adult artist and one created by a nonhuman animal or child. Participants had to indicate which work in the pair they preferred and then judge their quality. Sometimes the works were unlabeled, sometimes the works were labeled correctly (with animal art labeled as being generated by an animal and human art labeled as being generated by a human), and sometimes the works were labeled incorrectly (the human and animal labels were reversed).
Impressively, both art students and non–art students consistently preferred works done by professional artists even when choosing works erroneously labeled as generated by a child, chimpanzee, or elephant. Most critically, when participants explained why they preferred works by professional adults, they did so by appealing to the artists’ intentions. Participants perceived a mind behind the artworks generated by adults, and the presence of mind enhanced people’s evaluations. In follow-up work by Winner and colleagues, participants had to identify which of a set of artworks was produced by a human professional artist, child, or animal and found that even nonexperts could identify human-made artworks with better-than-chance accuracy. Again, participants discriminated between human and nonhuman works by identifying greater intentionality (the degree of intention) in the artworks by adult humans. Intentionality signaled the presence of a human, which in turn created value.
Human intention not only enhances the significance of objects but also the significance of experiences. Research led by Kurt Gray, for example, has demonstrated that awareness of the human intention behind an experience makes it more pleasurable.14 In one of his studies, participants received candy and were told that either another human intentionally chose the candy for them or that the candy was selected at random. Participants consumed the candy and then evaluated how much they liked it. People who learned of the benevolent human intention behind the candy selection process rated the candy as better tasting than those who learned the candy was chosen randomly. Gray conducted another experiment showing that people experienced more pleasure from an electric massage administered by a human versus a computer because knowing a human’s benevolent intentions enhanced the experience.
I often think of this research when I interact with anyone on LinkedIn. Often, the social network suggests I congratulate one of my contacts on starting a new job. When I click to offer my congratulations, it automatically composes a message (“Congrats on the new job!”) that I can post without having to think of some celebratory sentiment on my own. Similarly, when someone sends me a congratulatory message on LinkedIn, the system automatically composes reply options for me to send including “Thanks,” “Thank you,” and a thumbs-up emoji. Out of laziness I often use the automated options, but I imagine my contacts would experience them less meaningfully if they knew these messages were generated by a machine rather than through my benevolent intentions.
In examining intentionality, Gray also demonstrated in a follow-up study that not just positive intentions but negative intentions as well can amplify the meaning of an experience. In this study, all participants received electric shocks from another person, their study partner. Participants either believed their partner was shocking them with good intentions (to win them a large prize) or bad intentions (out of simple malevolence). Participants reported how much pain they felt from each shock, and results revealed that positive intentions made the shock feel more pleasant and negative intentions made the shock feel more painful (compared to when participants received no information about human intentions). Beyond mere positivity, human intentions convey significance. Compliments that we receive by accident feel less meaningful than compliments we receive on purpose, and the same is true of insults.
The significance we ascribe to intentions also explains why people value human-made objects more than machine-manufactured ones. The work of psychologist Robert Kreuzbauer and colleagues shows that the confluence of two factors drives this tendency: (1) how symbolic the particular object is—that is, how much the object is meant to communicate something, and (2) how much intentional control the creator has over the particular object.15 In Kreuzbauer’s studies he described to participants several objects in terms of either their symbolic properties (i.e., aesthetics) or their functional properties (i.e., utility). One study, for example, described a wine glass by highlighting its shape as a symbolic property or its durability as a functional property. In addition, some participants read that the wine glass company has developed a special glassblowing technique that reflects each glassblower’s unique agency over the process, whereas other participants read that the glassblowing technique removes the agency of any particular glassblower so that the wine glasses are identical. People reported valuing the wine glass more when they read about the glass in terms of its symbolic property and learning that each one varied according to the glassblower’s work. In other words, when an object is intended to convey a symbolic expression and a human being has agency in crafting that expression, people view the object as meaningful and, therefore, valuable.
In other studies, Kreuzbauer and colleagues show that the joint presence of symbolic expression and human agency explains why people prefer handmade entities. The combination of these two factors highlights the role of the creator’s intention in generating value in a particular product, object, or work of art. Fashion designer Christian Louboutin captures this preference for human-generated objects in stating, “I hate the idea of natural. For example, I prefer gardens to wild nature. I like to see the human touch. High heels are a complete invention—an extravagance. They’re far from natural, but it’s the impracticality that I adore. I prefer the useless to the useful.”16 Louboutin, known for his ostentatious designs and signature red-bottomed high heels, conveys how people come to value human-produced objects. Humans can communicate something expressive beyond mere function, and this expression coupled with intentionality can give an object enhanced meaning.
Marketing scholar Stijn van Osselaer and colleagues have conducted research showing that this preference for human-crafted entities extends toward less symbolic objects as well.17 In their studies, participants evaluated various consumer goods (e.g., stationery, scarves, and soaps) learning that these goods were either handmade or made by machine. Participants who learned the goods were handmade expressed more willingness to buy them, purchase them as a gift, and pay more for them.
A recent lawsuit against Maker’s Mark Whisky illustrates the premium that consumers place on human touch. Californians Safora Nowrouzi and Travis Williams claim they were defrauded by Maker’s Mark labeling their bourbon as handmade. Their lawsuit noted that despite this claim, a video of the company’s factory shows the use of machines to mix ingredients, break up grains, ferment, and distill. The plaintiffs argued that “they overpaid for the bourbon based on the claim and wouldn’t have bought it—or would have paid less—if they’d known otherwise.”18 Although their lawsuit was dismissed, it nonetheless highlights the value that the human-made designation confers.
Van Osselaer’s studies provide critical insight as to why people prefer handmade to machine-made products: love. Participants reported believing that handmade products contained more love and were made with more love than machine-made products. In an increasingly technologically advanced age, the demand for handmade goods has never been higher. Websites like Etsy have helped independent craftspeople who specialize in handmade products sell their goods to a broad market. And Amazon.com has similarly launched “Amazon Handmade,” a marketplace specifically for handmade products. As automation enables quick mass production of various products, the unique love perceived within handmade goods takes on enhanced value.
Similar to van Osselaer’s work, psychologist Veronika Job and colleagues showed in their research that the mere trace of a human creator enhanced people’s assessments of an object’s value.19 Learning that a mug was “made by people in Small Factory in Nebraska” led people to value these products more compared to learning they were “made by a Small Factory in Nebraska” (with no mention of people). As with van Osselaer’s studies, Job’s participants believed that the human touch imbued objects with social qualities such as warmth, friendliness, and sincerity.
Still other research shows that human intentions convey aesthetic value. Neuroscientist Ulrich Kirk and colleagues demonstrated this belief in scanning participants’ brains while asking them to evaluate artworks.20 Sometimes Kirk labeled the artworks as computer generated, and at other times he labeled them as coming from a real-life art gallery, even though the actual works were the same. Ostensibly human-generated artwork (relative to ostensibly computer-generated artwork) produced greater activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a key region involved in representing value and pleasure. People also rated human-made works as more appealing. This research fits with Winner’s work on human versus animal art and suggests people intuitively infer that humans have intentional minds, and these minds create value.
Independent of effort or intentionality, mere human contact can enhance an object’s significance. This is because many people subscribe to what social scientists call the “law of magical contagion.” This law represents the belief that a person can transfer his or her essence to that object simply by touching it. Anthropologist James G. Frazer in 1980 was the first to document this tendency as prevalent in “savage and barbarous” society, yet we still succumb to this belief in the modern age.21 I personally disavow magical thinking, but when pondering what items I would save from my house if it were burning down, I find myself indulging in contagion beliefs. I turn to two objects: a wristband worn in-game by NBA legend Kevin Garnett emblazoned with his initials and number “KG 21” and a vial of my cousin’s ashes. I consider both objects to be priceless despite their finite value in an open market—a few hundred dollars in the case of the wristband (per eBay) and likely nothing at all in the case of the vial. For me, the objects derive their value from the essence of those people contained within them and from these people’s significance to me.
Contagion effects in fact go beyond personal attachments. In one notable demonstration, psychologists Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin demonstrated that people refused to wear a sweater that Adolf Hitler had previously worn.22 Consistent with the idea of contagion, Nemeroff and Rozin also found they could nudge people to wear the sweater by telling them that Mother Teresa had also worn it. Good people can imbue goodness into whatever they touch.
Psychologists George Newman and Paul Bloom have also demonstrated social contagion in showing that celebrity contact with objects enhances their value. In one set of studies (alluded to in the introduction) Newman and Bloom examined the estate auctions of John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Onassis, and Marilyn Monroe.23 The researchers coded each item in the auction—antiques, art, decorations, furniture, literature, tableware, clothing, and jewelry—in terms of how much physical contact the former owners had with it. They found this measure of perceived physical contact predicted larger final bids on these items, even when accounting for preauction estimates of the items. To fully capture the contagion phenomenon, Newman and Bloom also examined how perceived physical contact affected disgraced businessman Bernie Madoff’s estate auction and found that perceived physical contact predicted reduced final bids for his items (think back to people’s unwillingness to wear a sweater worn by Hitler). These findings again demonstrate that humans transmit their essence into objects through contact, significantly altering their significance and value.
What is it specifically about contagion that creates significance? The likely mechanism is through establishing authenticity, which people value greatly. Research shows that people trust and cooperate more with others who flash an authentic smile versus a fake smile.24 People also view themselves more positively when they feel authentic versus inauthentic.25 Consumers prefer to buy authentic goods ranging from travel souvenirs to athletic shoes and value products more when they were manufactured in the company’s original factory than manufactured elsewhere.26
Other work by Newman and Bloom showed that contagion explains why people value original art over perfect duplicates.27 People valued original artwork more because of contact with the original human creator, which signals authenticity. In the real-world art market, authenticity can mean the difference between millions of dollars and worthlessness. Famed art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi received a six-year jail term for creating and passing off perfect duplicates of works by Max Ernst, Georges Braque, and Fernand Leger. He fooled collectors and expert art historians into multimillion-dollar sales until his 2016 arrest, when those artworks completely lost their worth. Franziska Beltracchi, daughter of Wolfgang and his wife/accomplice Helene, remarked, “I think they didn’t really hurt anybody. They took money for pictures that people wanted. Maybe now they’re not worth anything, but they still got the picture.”28 The younger Beltracchi’s remark suggests that the link between human contact, contagion, authenticity, and value may not necessarily be intuitive or obvious.
One other domain where authenticity rules is in the experience of dining out, with research suggesting that a hint of human presence can convey a restaurant’s authenticity, thereby boosting its appeal. Organizational behavior scholar Balázs Kovács and colleagues demonstrated this phenomenon by examining over one million Yelp restaurant reviews.29 They found that restaurants that garnered reviews containing more authenticity-related words (e.g., “authentic,” “real,” “genuine”) received higher ratings. Also, this relationship was strongest for family-owned restaurants, which people perceived as particularly authentic, compared with restaurant chains. A follow-up study showed that the presence of humans, conveyed by family ownership rather than some ostensibly faceless corporate ownership, made people like the restaurant more through establishing authenticity.
To summarize the research on this point, we’ve learned that human presence, human touch, and human creation give objects value through instilling them with authenticity. This transfer process is most effective when the human who has touched the object is perceived positively. The effects of positive social contagion, combined with the value-enhancing effects of human effort and human intentionality, make humans a vast source of meaning, capable of boosting the significance of artifacts and experiences with their presence.
AS WE see in further detail in chapter 7, the significance we attach to humans may become problematic in an increasingly automated world. In certain cases, nonhuman agents may perhaps serve us better than humans, as some research is beginning to illustrate.
As a mundane example, if faced with a choice of hearing a funny joke selected by a human or selected by an algorithm, most choose a human. Yet selecting a joke turns out to be something that algorithms do better than humans. Behavioral economist Mike Yeomans and colleagues discovered this by implementing algorithmic joke recommender systems and comparing them to human joke recommenders.30 Across several studies, algorithmic recommenders consistently selected jokes that people rated as funnier than jokes selected by human recommenders. However, when people predicted which one would recommend a funnier joke, they predicted a human recommender more frequently than an algorithmic recommender. In one study, 69 percent of people guessed a person rather than an algorithm would better predict what jokes people would prefer, and 74 percent of people preferred to receive joke recommendations from a human compared to an algorithm. In other words, people predicted that human-selected jokes would be funnier, but in practice they found machine-selected jokes to be superior. The significance we ascribe to humans can mislead us.
Psychologist Berkeley Dietvorst and colleagues captured a similar phenomenon (that they termed algorithm aversion) in the domain of forecasting. They showed that people consistently placed greater bets on human predictors versus algorithmic predictors for forecasting things like the success of applicants to an MBA program or which US states would generate the most airline passengers.31 In fact, Dietvorst’s participants placed greater confidence in human forecasters than algorithmic forecasters even when the algorithms outperformed the humans.
Of course, people prefer humans to algorithms for several reasons, and Yeomans’s and Dietvorst’s studies suggest at least two: (1) people (falsely) believe that humans are more capable at improving than algorithms and (2) people dislike the opaqueness of algorithms (although they seem comfortable with the opaqueness of humans). Separately, the simple significance granted by human touch leads people to overvalue humans and to undervalue algorithms. Given the increasing need for humans to trust algorithms in tasks ranging from cancer diagnosis to flying a plane, imbuing algorithmic systems with some humanness is essential to demonstrating their worth to users. Again, I expand on how to humanize these systems in chapter 7. In the next chapter, we continue to see how humans’ mere presence gives our worlds not only a sense of meaning but a sense of morality as well.