A Matter of Touch

Androgynous faces are perceived as male or female depending on how and what you touch

We do not just think with our brains, our bodies are crucial to our view of the world. This is true not just in the naive sense that we hear, see and touch through our bodies, but in a far more specific way that is not so intuitive. A large body of evidence is emerging that shows that the way we categorise objects and people through our brains may depend surprisingly on perceptions filtering their way up through other parts of the body.

Michael Slepian, in his graduate work at Tufts University, has run two recent experiments that build on a body of work that is fast gaining heft. According to a press release about a recent article in the journal Psychological Science, ‘For one experiment, people were given either a hard or a soft ball to hold, then told to squeeze it continuously while looking at pictures of faces on a computer. Each face had been made to look exactly gender-neutral, so it was neither male nor female. For each face, the volunteer had to categorise it as male or female. People who were squeezing the soft ball were more likely to judge faces as female, while people who handled the hard ball were more likely to categorise them as male. The same effect was found in a second experiment in which people wrote their answers on a piece of paper with carbon paper underneath; some were told to press hard, to make two copies, and some were told to press lightly, so the carbon paper could be reused. People who were pressing hard were more likely to categorise faces as male, while the
soft writers were more likely to choose female.’

“We were really surprised,” says Slepian, “It’s remarkable that the feeling of handling something hard or soft can influence how you visually perceive a face.” Other recent studies have suggested similar effects in other ways. According to the release, ‘For example, weight conveys importance; just giving someone a heavy clipboard to hold will make them judge something as more important than someone who holds a light clipboard.’

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