Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain. That is, scientists have discovered a particular kind of nerve fiber in people’s skin—especially in the face and arms—that appears to have developed specifically to transmit the pleasantness of social touch. Those nerve fibers transmit their signal too slowly to be of much use in helping you do the things you normally associate with the sense of touch: determining what is touching you and telling you, with some precision, where you were touched.21 “They won’t help you distinguish a pear from pumice or your cheek from your chin,” says the social neuroscientist pioneer Ralph Adolphs. “But they are connected directly to areas of the brain such as the insular cortex, which is associated with emotion.”22
To primatologists, the importance of touch is no surprise. Nonhuman primates touch each other extensively during grooming. And while grooming is ostensibly about hygiene, it would take only about ten minutes of grooming a day for an animal to stay clean. Instead, some species spend hours on it.23 Why? Remember those grooming cliques? In nonhuman primates, social grooming is important for maintaining social relationships.24 Touch is our most highly developed sense when we are born, and it remains a fundamental mode of communication throughout a baby’s first year and an important influence throughout a person’s life.25
AT A QUARTER to eight on the evening of September 26, 1960, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy strode into the studio of the CBS affiliate WBBM in downtown Chicago.26 He appeared rested, bronzed, and fit. The journalist Howard K. Smith would later compare Kennedy to an “athlete come to receive his wreath of laurel.” Ted Rogers, the TV consultant to Kennedy’s Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, remarked, “When he came into the studio I thought he was Cochise, he was so tan.”
Nixon, on the other hand, looked haggard and pale. He had arrived fifteen minutes before Kennedy’s grand entrance. The two candidates were in Chicago for the first presidential debate in U.S. history. But Nixon had recently been hospitalized for a knee infection, which still plagued him. Then, ignoring advice to continue resting, he’d resumed a grueling cross-country campaign schedule and had lost considerable weight. As he climbed out of his Oldsmobile, he suffered from a 102 degree fever, yet he insisted he was well enough to go through with the debate. When judged by the candidates’ words, Nixon was indeed destined to hold his own that night. But the debate would proceed on two levels, the verbal and the nonverbal.
The issues of the day included the conflict with communism, agriculture and labor problems, and the candidates’ experience. Since elections are high-stakes affairs and debates are about important philosophical and practical issues, the candidates’ words are all that should matter, right? Would you be swayed to vote against a candidate because a knee infection had made him look tired? Like voice and touch, posture, facial appearance, and expression exert a powerful influence on how we judge people. But would we elect a president based on demeanor?
CBS’s debate producer, Don Hewitt, took one look at Nixon’s gaunt face and immediately heard alarm bells. He offered both candidates the services of a makeup artist, but after Kennedy declined, so did Nixon. Then, while an aide rubbed an over-the-counter cosmetic called Lazy Shave over Nixon’s famously heavy five o’clock shadow, out of their view Kennedy’s people proceeded to give Kennedy a full cosmetic touch-up. Hewitt pressed Rogers, Nixon’s TV consultant, about his candidate’s appearance, but Rogers said he was satisfied. Hewitt then elevated his concern to his boss at CBS. He, too, approached Rogers but received the same response.
Some seventy million people watched the debate. When it was over, one prominent Republican in Texas was heard to say, “That son of a bitch just cost us the election.” That prominent Republican was in a good position to know. He was Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Richard Nixon’s running mate. When the election was held, some six weeks later, Nixon and Lodge lost the popular vote by a hair, just 113,000 out of the 67,000,000 votes cast. That’s less than 1 vote in 500, so even if the debate had convinced just a small percentage of viewers that Nixon wasn’t up to the job, it would have been enough to swing the election.
What’s really interesting here is that, while viewers like Lodge were thinking that Nixon did horribly, a slew of other prominent Republicans had a completely different experience. For example, Earl Mazo, the national political correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune—and a Nixon supporter—attended a kind of debate party with eleven governors and members of their staffs, all in town for the Southern Governors Conference in Hot Springs, Arkansas.27 They thought Nixon did splendidly. Why was their experience so different from Lodge’s? They had listened to the debate over the radio, because the television broadcast was delayed by one hour in Arkansas.
Of the radio broadcast, Mazo said, “[Nixon’s] deep, resonant voice conveyed more conviction, command, and determination than Kennedy’s higher-pitched voice and his Boston-Harvard accent.” But when the television feed came, Mazo and the governors switched to it and watched the first hour again. Mazo then changed his mind about the winner, saying, “On television, Kennedy looked sharper, more in control, more firm.” A Philadelphia commercial research firm, Sindlinger & Co., later confirmed that analysis. According to an article in the trade journal Broadcasting, their research showed that among radio listeners, Nixon won by more than a two-to-one margin, but among the far greater number of television viewers, Kennedy beat him.
The Sindlinger study was never published in a scientific journal, and little niceties like sample size—and the methodology for accounting for demographic differences between radio and TV users—were not revealed. That’s how the issue stood for some forty years. Then, in 2003, a researcher enlisted 171 summer school students at the University of Minnesota to assess the debate, half after watching a video of it, half after listening to the audio only.28 As scientific subjects, these students had an advantage over any group that might have been assembled at the time of the actual debate: they had no vested interest in either candidate and little or no knowledge of the issues. To the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player. But their impression of the debate was no different from that of the voters four decades earlier: those students who watched the debate were significantly more likely to think Kennedy won than those who only listened to it.