To Touch or Not to Touch?: How Touch Influences Decision Confidence

An unfortunate reality of online shopping is that people do not have the opportunity to touch the actual products. When choosing between different options online, people often wish that they could touch the options in person and believe that doing so would result in an easier choice (Childers, Carr, Peck, and Carson 2001; Zhou, Dai, and Zhang 2007). In most cases, touching provides useful information by allowing people to examine the haptic characteristics of a target including texture and shape, which in turn widely affect attitudes and behaviors (see Krishna 2012 for a review). However, little is known for cases where touching does not provide any useful information. Do people still desire the opportunity to touch and expect touching to be helpful? For instance, do people naïvely believe that being able to touch a bottle of wine would help, even though touching the bottle itself offers no informative advantage? If so, does touching in those cases actually help?