A study conducted by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Yale University has shown that sensations of touch such as hardness, texture or weight can significantly influence impressions about people, and even decisions.

The research showed that heavy paper resumes make job candidates appear important, rough objects make social interactions become difficult and hard objects tend to increase stiffness during dialogues.

Joshua Ackerman, assistant professor of marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management and lead author of the study said, “Touch shapes both the impressions we form about other people and the decisions that we make.”

He further said that the impressions may get influenced by touch along with a host of other factors. Various unconscious influences exists around us however touch plays a big role in how we perceive things, he said.

The research expands the findings of an earlier reach by Yale psychologists John Bargh and Lawrence Williams that found that people are more generous after touching a warn drink instead of a cold one.

In the recent report, Christopher Nocera, a graduate student of psychology at Harvard along with Ackerman, Bargh conducted six experiments imitating similar to real life situations to find how touch influences impressions and decision making.

The experiments showed that hardness, texture or weight of the object touches influences impressions even if the object is not related to the discussion or situation.

In an experiment volunteers were asked to sit on hard wooden chairs and soft cushioned chair. Then they were asked to negotiate and bring the price of a car down. Those sitting on the hard chairs were less flexible in negotiations when compared to those sitting on soft cushioned chairs.

The study will be published in the US journal Science on Friday. Researchers say that the findings have many practical uses like negotiation settings can be adjusted for better outcome and products packaging could be designed while paying attention to touch related factors.