Embodied Gentleness Effect: The Influence of Hand Movements on Food Preferences

Imagine that you have just finished some hand grip exercises, or you have just finished putting together a puzzle. You find some grapes and apples on the kitchen table. Which fruit would you choose to eat? These scenarios depict a common consumption phenomenon where consumers engage in certain hand movements prior to making seemingly unrelated food decisions. Hands are one of the most frequently used body parts in consumers’ daily life so it is not surprising that consumer judgments and decisions can be shaped by hand sensations and movements (e.g., Elder and Krishna 2012; Hung and Labroo 2011; Krishna 2006; Krishna, Elder, and Caldara 2010; Krishna and Morrin 2008; Lee and Schwarz 2010; Peck and Shu 2009; Peck and Wiggins 2006; Xu, Zwick, and Schwarz 2012). This paper contributes to this realm of research by examining the influence of incidental hand movements on consumer food preferences. Specifically, we focus on how hand movement gentleness could shape consumer attitudes toward food with different haptic hardness (Klatzky and Lederman 1992, 1993). The embodied cognition literature suggests that perceptual-motor patterns are an integral part of the multimodal representation of concepts (Barsalou 2008). Hence, the sensations a person feels at any given time can drive experiences offering similar sensations to become more accessible in the memory. Thus, making gentle hand movements (e.g., using a sensitive computer mouse setting) causes a host of “gentle touch” activities (e.g., eating food with low haptic hardness) to become more “top of mind.” As a consequence, these highly accessible activities could be preferred more than less accessible activities (e.g., eating food with high haptic hardness), because the former is more “top of mind,” and therefore easier to simulate and activate. Hence the embodied cognition literature would posit that making gentle hand movements should lead to increased preferences toward food with low (vs. high) haptic hardness. Moreover, the accessibility of the “gentle touch” experiences could be increased through hand movements primed both temporarily and chronically (Higgins 1996), and this embodied gentleness effect could appear when the haptic cues are physically available and when they are only verbally communicated (Krishna and Morrin 2008). Three studies were conducted to test these predictions.