A Virtual Midas Touch? Touch, Compliance, and Confederate Bias in Mediated Communication

A brief touch to the shoulder or upper arm increases people's helping behavior and willingness to comply with requests. In this manuscript, we investigate whether this well-known Midas touch effect is also operative in mediated interactions where the touch act is replaced by electromechanical stimulation through a tactile display. With two experiments (one with an informed and one with a blind confederate) and a meta-analysis, we demonstrate that stimulation through a tactile display can induce similar helping behavior as actual interpersonal physical contact. This virtual Midas touch effect suggests that electromechanical stimuli are processed in ways similar to actual touch. Our experiments thus have important implications for the design of communication media, which, to date, do not support physical contact. At the same time, the results illustrate the promising use of tactile displays in touch research, for example, to avoid the confederate bias intrinsic to studies in naturalistic settings.