“Digital hugs are largely a matter of skill,” Mark James explained. The COVID-19 pandemic inspired the post-doctoral researcher at Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology in Japan to better understand the paradoxical gesture. As it turns out, hugs without the physical embrace still count.
James and his co-author, John Francis Leader at University College Dublin, used more than 2,000 subjective reports on life during the first wave of COVID-19 as a starting point for their research. Many celebrated technology for helping maintain social relationships during lockdowns, but it didn’t do much for others.
Noting that difference, the two realised it wasn’t technology alone that defined how people felt. “What you did before, during, and even after the interaction—such as how you reflected upon the interaction itself—became relevant in shaping your online social experience,” James elaborates.
“It’s people using the right skills in the right way at the right time that characterises good social interactions digitally too, which in turn can generate a sense of meaning, connection, and care in these spaces,” he adds. He’s talking about their paper “Do digital hugs work? Re-embodying our social lives online with digital tact”, published in Frontiers in Psychology on August 9, 2023.
The authors developed the concept of digital tact to describe the key ingredient for good virtual hugs. People who possess this skill remember that on the other side of the interaction is another human being with emotions and needs – and recognise those may differ from their own. James explains it’s easy to spot when digital tact is missing: “You can immediately sense the absence of tact when, for instance, you are on the phone with someone who is washing dishes or engaged in another task.”
The researchers used the Mixed Reality Interaction Matrix (MRIM) framework to explore differences between in-person and online hugs (see Fig 1). Three reality conditions (physical, virtual, and imaginary) and three interaction dimensions (extrapersonal, intrapersonal, and interpersonal) make up nine squares. Together, the squares form a continuum of experienced hugginess.
The research team managed to translate every component of the real embrace to the digital space, except -obviously- the interpersonal-physical one. But this is not necessarily a limiting factor when other elements are amplified. “People who could kind of turn up the volume on other components of the interaction seem to be able to compensate somewhat for the absence of those that are not available, like physical touch,” James clarifies.
The MRIM is only the first step to understanding better how to emulate the warm fuzzies of a real hug. The researcher adds, “In fact, having such a map allows you to start thinking about which components are more relevant and contribute more to the experience. It’s an attempt to grasp the elements of a subjective experience.”
Insights of that kind can help movie and game makers captivate their audiences, improve the well-being of remote workers, or the effectiveness of online educators.
Subjective reports on life during the first wave of COVID-19 helped construct the theoretical MRIM for hugs. But in the next step, that theory needs to be tested. I, for one, anticipate a series of mildly odd experiments.
Source: Frontiers in Psychology via EurekAlert!
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