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Touch, Compliance, and Homophobia

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Abstract

As has already been indicated in numerous studies, touching or holding someone by the arm while asking for something increases our chances of having our request fulfilled. However, the three experiments presented in this article which were conducted in Poland, indicate that in the conditions when a man requests something from another man, touch actually negatively affects the chances for request fulfillment. This effect seems to be linked to the strong male homophobia characteristic of the society within which the experiments were carried out.

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Notes

  1. In the literature on the subject, few studies can be found in which the effect of touch on compliance has not been proved (e.g., Bohm and Hendricks 1997; Remland and Jones 1994).

  2. Five Zloty is equivalent to ca. $1.50

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Acknowledgments

The preparation of this article was made possible by a research grant from the Polish Ministry of Sciences and Higher Education (grant number 1343/H03/2006/31).

My warm thanks are extended to Judith A. Hall, the Associate Editor of the journal, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Wroclaw Faculty, Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, ul. Grunwaldzka 98, 50-357, Wroclaw, Poland

    Dariusz Dolinski

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  1. Dariusz Dolinski
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Correspondence to Dariusz Dolinski.

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Dolinski, D. Touch, Compliance, and Homophobia. J Nonverbal Behav 34, 179–192 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-010-0090-1

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