The virtual midas touch: helping behavior after a mediated social touch

ABSTRACT

A brief touch on the upper arm increases people's altruistic behavior and willingness to comply to a request. In this paper, we investigate whether this Midas Touch effect would also occur under mediated conditions (i.e., a text messaging system and an arm strap equipped with vibrotactile actuators). Although helping behavior was more frequently endorsed in the touch, compared to the no touch condition, this difference was not found to be statistically significant. Such a failure to find response similarities between vibrotactile stimulation and real (i.e., unmediated) physical contact undermines the design rationale of the field of mediated social touch, which aims to provide an alternative for real physical contact.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Haptic I/O

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Prototyping; Evaluation/methodology

  J. Computer Applications
  J.4 SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
      Subjects: Psychology

General Terms:
Experimentation

Keywords:
assistance (social behavior), computer mediated communication, haptic feedback, mediated social touch, physical contact