The effect of incidental haptic sensations on intrapersonal judgements on a personality questionnaire
South African Journal of Psychology
Published online on October 19, 2016
Abstract
Extant research has shown that incidental haptic sensations can, nonconsciously, influence judgements of objects or people that are non-diagnostic (unrelated) for the actual qualities of the items being judged – including interpersonal judgements. Evidence suggests that this could also be true for intrapersonal judgements. The application of this conception to the use of personality questionnaires lead to the following hypothesis: incidental exposure to a specific haptic experience (firmness or flimsiness of the paper) could, nonconsciously, trigger physically grounded mental frameworks, which, in turn, may effect the intrapersonal judgements of individuals completing a personality questionnaire. A randomized post-test only, one-way experimental design was conducted using a sample of university students (n = 178). The experiment found evidence to support the hypothesis that a physically grounded mental framework, consistent with embodied cognition, could nonconsciously lead participants to form stronger self-judgements on agreeableness and extraversion, when encountering an incidental haptic experience of firmness in a personality questionnaire. The findings of this research may serve to create awareness of the influence of incidental haptic sensations as a confounding variable in questionnaire design. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.