Harvard Business Review article by Adam Waytz on June 05, 2019
Everywhere you look these days it seems that modern commerce has been designed to separate humans from each other. Smartphones keep our attention locked in a virtual realm, online retail allows us to browse and shop without leaving our home, and automated tellers and cashiers seem designed to remove human interaction entirely.
My research and that of others shows that when people think of what it means to be human, they typically consider two fundamental capacities: conscious experience (i.e., the capacity to feel) and agency (i.e., having thoughts and intentions). Human-to-human interaction is central to this conception. As a result, businesses that try to distance its customers from other humans are missing a critical tactic — refocusing their products on services around the power of human interaction provides an opportunity to create enormous social and economic value.
Human contact has an almost magical power: For example, research shows that holding a spouse’s hand or in some cases even holding a stranger’s hand reduces the aversiveness of painful stimuli (e.g., excessive heat, electric shocks).
A human touch also imbues experiences and products with special significance and so increases people’s perception of the value of those (more…)
