Consensual Hugs Seem to Reduce Stress | Hacker News Reader

Consensual Hugs Seem to Reduce Stress

scientificamerican.com

52 pointsLinuxBender37 comments

Hmm, the study didn't hand out hugs, but merely correlated people who'd happened to have received them. The study authors already note that "Individuals who report perceiving the availability of a network of supportive individuals tend to show better adaptation when faced with stress." People with a support network are doubtless more likely to be hugged. Therefore it's not clear to me that the hugs contribute anything, or that any attempt was made to control for this - a classic case of "study measures correlation, headline reports causality".

Good observation

I feel like non consensual anything adds stress. One of my least favorite things is being hugged by people I work with and I always feel awkward turning down a co worker.

I don't even like handshakes. I've seen countless people leave the restroom without washing their hands. Some people get offended if I won't shake their hand.

> I've seen countless people leave the restroom without washing their hands

I am not a germaphobe at all (I'll eat food off the floor if it falls), and I agree 100%. The non-washing of hands is endemic.

Fist bump to the rescue!

"I've got a cold, and you don't want it. Fist bump?"

"Power hugs" (my off-the-cuff term), in various formally defined and social settings. (Not as in mutually energizing; rather, like a couple of levels worse that the aggressive hand-shaker.)

Ugh

Why are you hugging your co-workers?

Presumably the coworkers want to hug him or her but they don't want to be hugged.

I've never been in a position to have to turn down a coworker's hug (thankfully), it seems very odd indeed. Like the GP, I woudln't engage in that sort of physical contact with coworkers.

> Why are you hugging your co-workers?

I get the impression that they were on the receiving end of the hugs :)

Some people lean toward the hug as a greeting or farewell, especially women. As a woman who doesn't like hugs, it's very uncomfortable for me. I used to work at an agency, and sometimes we'd even end up hugging clients after a big meeting.

Hang on for an uncomfortably long time and you'll get fewer hugs in the future. (assuming the hugger is just a platonic hugger)

There are workplaces where hugging is almost mandatory.

I've worked in such places. Kissing on cheek etc is also a thing. It will be interesting to see where that leads in the long tail of the #metoo change. I've already seen a lot of people who I've known to overly hug and show affection at work stop doing so. At one workplace HR got all "scorched earth" policy and made it very clear it wasn't acceptable at all. Apparently the concern was women initiating contact then feeling uncomfortable later and complaining about the person they hugged. Two instances at that site alone. I wonder how frequent it is since I'd never heard of it as a thing before.

I did some research on hugging and self-hugging for a presentation at a Chaos Computer Club event. Mainly trying to find out why self-hugs don't seem to work as well, despite many attempts to replicate a hug through technological solutions:

https://rybakov.com/essay/how_to_hug_yourself/

Because the hug is about the connection with the other, not about something arbitrary wrapping your body?

Mainly that. Furthermore, the topics of mutual vulnerability (both parties are defenseless during a hug), joint attention, synchronicity in movement (which reinforces bonding) are ignored in favour things that are easier to replicate, such as the anxiolytic qualities of chest compression.

In a way, a good consensual hug is a powerful promise of support and protection.

Some people—particularly on the autism spectrum— get stress relief from weighted blankets and things like the Thundershirt (the thundershirt is an as-seen-on-tv product for dogs, but there's similar garmets for people. I'm just not sure what the generic term would be).

That's called a "security blanket"

If we all hugged each other more would the world improve or would there be deflation of the stress-relieving value of a single hug?

We'd go nearly extinct via pandemic long before we had time to find out.

Unlikely. There are cultures where people hug a lot more and don’t go extinct (e.g. Brazil).

It was intended as a joke, but good point.

Give back a virtual hug.

Well, let’s file this under the category of obvious research findings?

Hindsight Devalues Science.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WnheMGAka4fL99eae/hindsight-...

Would you really have been surprised if the study's conclusion had been the opposite, or would you just rationalize that obviously there are a lot of introverts out there, and hugs stress them out disproportionately?

This is, in my opinion as a wedded empiricist, one of the main problems with science: it is extremely chauvinistic about forms of knowledge that did not originate in its chain of authority. A key function of the scientific culture is to establish the authority of a group who is qualified (according to the estimation of the members of the group) to rule on matters of evidence and methodology and, via their general approbation, to pronounce into existence new knowledge, which we then call "scientific" knowledge. Membership in this community is mostly through direct descent - graduates of the laboratory system.

This system, it is my observation, is extremely intolerant of knowledge produced by other systems. Other sources may be examined, but they must be interpreted, and more importantly tested, according to the established "scientific" methodologies (a collection of various inductive techniques, but, mostly, the use of complex physical and mathematical instruments), and then presented in the appropriately hallowed place using scientific jargon. Until such approval is given, the system is unwilling to acknowledge the validity of other kinds of knowledge. Thus, we have to once again "prove" what is already well-known to everybody.

A secondary problem is that the "acceptable methodology" criterion of scientific knowledge is subject to the latest vogue, and people don't read old papers, so everything we know must be re-proved or re-packaged using contemporary methodology every thirty years.

Isn't that a bit like saying that chess clubs are extremely intolerant of card games? I mean, science is science because it follows those methods. Other methods for producing knowledge may be perfectly valid, they're just a different thing.

Maybe we need a discipline which has the purpose of merging the knowledge from science with other source, but I don't think it's fair to criticize scientists for not doing that work - it's none of their business.

I'm not necessarily making a criticism, just observing a deficiency in the structure of the scientific apparatus. Scientists have constructed themselves and their polity in a fashion that does not allow them to merge knowledge from other sources. That is, to use your phrase, they have made it none of their business. This might have certain advantages, if we believed that scientific methods yielded unequivocally superior epistemological outcomes; but I don't think this is true across all kinds of knowledge. In this case, I think what's being demonstrated is that sometimes, those methods go through ponderous effort to demonstrate what can be learned efficiently through other means (viz., getting a warm hug when you need it).

I disagree with your premise. I believe there are advantages to having a body of knowledge built around consistent principles even if we don't believe that scientific methods yield unequivocally superior epistemological outcomes - in fact, even if we believe it yields inferior outcomes.

Scientism is certainly a problem, but the solution is not to jumble the methods of obtaining knowledge with science in an attempt to bleed some prestige from it. It should be to valorize those other methods separately, recognizing their particular advantages (and disadvantages) over science.

I'm not sure what advantage you think to obtain from inferior, but consistent, principles. For example, the "like cures like" principle is used to ill effect in many medical systems around the world. The only reason to support such a practice is prejudice - the conviction that the conclusions reached are, by themselves, superior merely because of the methodology used to produce them.

I don't advocate jumbling the methods of obtaining knowledge (although I think the notion of methodological purity in science is incorrect, I think the consistent principle in science is the establishment of authority, and not the methods applied by that authority, which change over time) - naturally every system must have its own internal consistency, or else it would not be a system. I advocate instead something close to what you are saying. It is fine to read scientific literature, but it is also useful to recognize that science can't tell you everything, and that its epistemology more or less fails at discovering certain things.

This doesn't make much sense to me. Science and the scientific method is a specific way of acquiring knowledge, why would a method used to acquire knowledge be interested in other ways of acquiring knowledge. Scientific knowledge tends to be regarded highly when it comes to many subjects because of the rigourous way it must be acquired and tested.

I'm not saying this is the best example of a study i've ever read, but the scientific method as we use it today was developed over a long time and is used because as of right now, this is the best way we've found to acquire useful knowledge. Is it the best? Maybe, maybe not. Has it given humanity consistently better and more accurate knowledge than other methods throughout history....personally i'd be willing to say yes.

Doing research, writing and presenting a paper don't exist to make science a special club. They're written the way they are to ensure all methodologies and results are clearly laid out and given, allowing others to repeat the process, the discussion giving the author's conclusion is kept separate from the rest.

The peer review system, while definitely flawed and full of problems, exists to ensure submitted papers followed reasonable methodologies and that the reported results and conclusions make sense.....

Now....that's the way it's supposed to be. In my experience, science isn't the problem it's scientists. Personally, the biggest problem I noticed, at least among biologists is worked with, was emotional attachment to personal theories and other things to the point where inconsistent or straight up contradictory data would be ignored or resampled until the desired results were found.

Money was also a pretty big problem especially when it comes to grants and continued funding. Again, inconsistent or contradictory data would be ignored to ensure the desired results and continued funding. Proposals would need to provide economic justification for funding. So there had to be an economically viable reason to do the study. And honestly, a lot of petty arguments and bullshit between scientists over the small amounts of funding available for different projects.

Science itself is great, the institutions we've built up around them not so much. They've corrupted it pretty heavily to the point where depending on who's funding a study you can already give a pretty good guess as to what the biases will be.

What kind of "knowledge produced by other systems" are you talking about?

For example, the colloquial knowledge that hugs make you feel better. Everyone knows this, that's why you say "I need a hug" when you're having a bad day. But this is not "scientific knowledge", because it wasn't produced by scientific methods, and cannot be acknowledged as valid knowledge by science (i.e., suitable basis for further scientific inquiry, or more precisely, a citation source in a reputable scientific journal) until it has been re-demonstrated that way. This translation of knowledge proceeds at the sometimes slow pace of scientific curiosity, and also at the limit of empirical methodology, which might struggle to reproduce what seems elementary knowledge ("hugs are nice").

"Everyone knows" a lot of things that testing has proven to be untrue. Everyone used to know that the Sun traveled around the Earth.

Maybe it's just me, but I get the implicature that they tested consensual and non-consensual hugs in their effects on stress, the latter of which seems like it would be hard to get past an institutional review board.

I inferred the same and was quite excited to see the results.

In fact, it seems they just asked people about hugs they received generally, without distinguishing between consensual and non-consensual hugs.

Classic case of popular science reporting over-promising and under-delivering.

Or just tested consensual hugs and didn't want to imply an effect outside of what was tested; that seems more likely to survive an IRB.

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