Touch, awareness of touch, and compliance with a request.

In certain situations it has been shown that touch has a positive effect on the compliance with a request expressed by a stranger. However, the difference between the effect of touch on request compliance between people who had noticed and those who had not noticed this contact has never been taken into account. In this experiment a female confederate asked 227 women to answer a questionnaire. When asking for their collaboration the forearm was or was not touched for a brief period of 1 to 2 seconds. Analysis showed that touch was associated with significantly higher compliance to the request but no difference was found between subjects who had noticed the tactual contact and subjects who had not noticed.