The Virtual Midas Touch: Helping Behavior after a Mediated Social Touch

摘要

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.