Do You Need a Hug?

MAUGHAN: You? No!

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DUCKWORTH: I’m Angela Duckworth.

MAUGHAN: I’m Mike Maughan.

DUCKWORTH + MAUGHAN: And you’re listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show: do humans need physical touch?

DUCKWORTH: Most of the interventions lasted five minutes or more.

MAUGHAN: Wait, a five-minute hug? That’s called cuddling.  

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DUCKWORTH: Mike, we have an email from a listener named Kristen, and she says it’s for both of us. So, you have to pay attention, okay?

MAUGHAN: Perfect. Hello, Kristen! 

DUCKWORTH: She’s like, “I have a question for Angela and Mike.”

MAUGHAN: “I have a question just for Angela.” And I’m like, “Okay, well, I will see you next time.”

DUCKWORTH: I’m just going to take a nap. Okay, Kristen asks, “I’ve heard that babies can die if they don’t receive physical touch. Is physical touch a basic need for adults as well? During Covid lockdown, I noticed a longing for hugs that I could feel emotionally and physically. Since then, I’ve continued to be aware of this longing if I go a few days, or sometimes even less without hugs.” Don’t you just want to go find Kristen and give her a hug?

MAUGHAN: I was going to say, I knew that’s where you were going to go.

DUCKWORTH: Exactly. I was like, “Kristen, come on, bring it in.”

MAUGHAN: Look, I think that hugs are really important. I, I will say my immediate reaction came to my graduate school experience. Because I was doing a joint degree, so I would move between Harvard and Northwestern every semester or two. At Kellogg, at business school, it was a very, like, “shake hands” culture and very fun and exciting. But at the Kennedy School, it was much more serious. Like, you’d sit down to lunch and within 10 to 12 seconds, people were talking about nuclear nonproliferation, and you’re like, “This is not fun.” Interesting, but not fun. 

DUCKWORTH: That sounds like Harvard.  

MAUGHAN: But, what was interesting about it — my program was mostly international. And everybody would greet each other with that one kiss on the cheek or the two kisses on either side of the cheek. And it created this level of — obviously very platonic, but intimacy among everyone, because it’s such a cultural tradition in many countries. And I found when I would go back to business school in Chicago — where the program was still very international, but it just lacked the same culture — you know, I’d been for six months kissing everyone on the cheek and they me, and then you get back to Northwestern and your immediate reaction was, “Oh, wait, no, that’s not a thing here.” And I found that I missed it. It’s not part of U.S. culture, it’s not something I do now, but for that one period of time at the Harvard Kennedy School, where it was just something that everybody did, I actually found that it was kind of this really beautiful tradition and, again, very platonic intimacy where it drew people together in a way that I don’t think I ever understood before and haven’t experienced since.

DUCKWORTH: So, when I got this question, I was also thinking about, like, “Oh yeah, what’s my own experience?” Because we have a kind of a touch history, right? Like, when I was growing up, my mom and my dad rarely hugged me. I’m not saying that they never touched me or never embraced me in any way. And by the way, researchers who study touch distinguish between embracing and hugging. Embracing is like one arm; hugging is like, you know, really bringing it in. 

MAUGHAN: Oh, it’s like the side hug is the embrace. 

DUCKWORTH: Exactly. The side — They call it “embracing,” but it’s pretty much a side hug. And then there’s something called “stroking,” which —

MAUGHAN: Terrible, terrible, terrible name. No matter what you’re about to say, it’s a terrible name. 

DUCKWORTH: Absolutely has to be rebranded. It’s like petting. Okay, that doesn’t help very much.

MAUGHAN: Which also sounds so bad!

DUCKWORTH: It does sound so bad. We’ll work on another word for that. And then there’s kissing. But there are all these forms of physical touch. And when I think about the way I grew up, you know, my parents were born in China, and I have to say, it wasn’t like I would come home from after-school activities and my dad would be like, “Hey, come on, give me a hug!” Like, never. Maybe graduating from high school? So, it’s interesting because this form of human interaction, on one hand, is universal. So, there have been these cross-cultural studies. There is no culture in the world that doesn’t have some ritual of touch — touch between strangers, like shaking hands, et cetera; touch between intimates, like parent-child or romantic partners. But at the same time, the same research shows that there’s enormous diversity in how much touch is normal and the kinds of touch that are normal. So, I feel like I grew up in this Chinese household, even though we were in New Jersey. Like, culturally, it was pretty low touch.

MAUGHAN: And I would imagine — I don’t have this data, but I would imagine that, for example, in Latin America, it’s a very high-touch culture.

DUCKWORTH: You know, let me look it up, because there actually is this paper that looked at touch around the world. There are 14,000 people who answered a survey in 45 countries and the bottom-line finding is that, there is no culture that doesn’t have forms of touch, but then there’s variation among those countries. And in the survey — which is so cute because they actually have these cartoons, because when you ask people, like, “In the last week, have you done this kind of touch?”

MAUGHAN: They use a cartoon to show it. 

DUCKWORTH: Right? You have to show people what you mean by “embrace.” So there’s this little picture of these faceless, hairless mannequins who are —

MAUGHAN: This is getting worse.  

DUCKWORTH: I know, you’re like, “I’m so glad I was not one of the 14,000 people in this study.” But they have four categories of touch that are of central interest. So, one is the side hug, you know, embrace, the one arm. The second one — sorry, close your ear — stroke. They literally have a picture of one hand on another and, like, an arrow going back and forth to show stroking.

MAUGHAN: You rub someone’s arm? I don’t understand.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah! Have you never done that? Have you never gently, um — stroked another person’s forearm? Never?

MAUGHAN: I hope not.  

DUCKWORTH: There’s something about the moving back and forth that’s freaking you out. 

MAUGHAN: Yeah, let’s just move on to the next one. 

DUCKWORTH: Okay, we’ll move on. So the third one is “kiss.” And they have, again, these like mannequin heads kissing the other with their lips. which you experienced a lot of during your time getting your master’s degree at Harvard. And then “hugging.” I love this cartoon the most because, like, one person has the other person in their arms with their hands touching each other on their back, and the other person has their head on that mannequin’s shoulder. It’s a very cute cartoon — hard for me to explain in words. But then you just fill out the survey and you’re like, “Okay for each kind of touch, just indicate yes or no whether or not in the last week you have touched each of these kinds of people in this way” — from your romantic partner, all the way to, like, strangers. So, it’s like, friends, children, et cetera. Obviously, it’s not relevant for some people, like, if they don’t have children. But what the research finds is that China — I mean, my eyes go right to this row in the table because it’s like really low ratings. They were so much an outlier, in that the rate of touching was so low, they had to exclude China from analyses because otherwise they would like —  

MAUGHAN: Draw down the average?

DUCKWORTH: Exactly! They would, like, kind of deform the statistical model because they were so far off the mean. And I have to say, this explained so much. Compared to the United States, compared to Austria, compared, like, to all these other countries, China was extremely low touch.

MAUGHAN: So, you know what’s interesting?  I looked at a different study. It had 40,000 responses across 112 countries. And it happened right before the pandemic. And it was an online survey developed by psychologists at Goldsmiths, University of London for use by the BBC called “The Touch Test,” And almost half of the typical adult felt that society did not enable us to touch enough.

DUCKWORTH: And this is before the pandemic. This was not a reaction to social distancing. 

MAUGHAN: Isn’t that interesting? Seventy-two percent of people reported a positive attitude toward touch. This is the dumbest but best line in the survey: “The leading reason people gave for why we do not touch enough was consent.” And I’m like, “Yeah, good, get consent. That is a good thing.” 

DUCKWORTH: Consent is good. We’re “thumbs up” on consent.  

MAUGHAN: But the three most common words used to describe touch were “comforting, warm, and love.”

DUCKWORTH: There is this study that I found once, read it, had my mind blown, and have not been able to find it since. And it’s totally driving me crazy. But I remember it was from decades ago, and I was like, “That study would totally not be able to be run today.” And it was about light physical touch, just sort of like the hand on the forearm. And this randomized assignment study was that professors were either assigned to lightly touch the forearms of their students as they were entering or exiting the room, like the lecture hall, versus not. And I think the finding was, that the students had, I guess, higher ratings for the course or they felt more engaged or closer to the professor, et cetera. And I have to say, Mike, I know that we can’t run the study to — I, I certainly am not going to run the study, like, “I randomly assigned professors to touch their students.” I’m not going to run that study. But I think there is a basic need for us to not just see each other and not just hear each other, but yeah, touch each other. And I actually hug my students with great frequency. At the end of my class, like the very last day of the semester, there’s, like, a hug line. And you get in the line, or you don’t want to get in the line, and I just want to give you one last hug because, like, I’ve hugged you all semester. And I tell them if they ever see me on the street, they need to make a beeline over to me and then they have to remind me who they are because I have terrible eyesight and poor facial recognition. And then if they want to, but I would like it, come give me a hug. And of course, you know, it’s up to students. So, it’s completely their choice. But for me, even though I’m a professor at a university, I’m not, like, a kindergarten teacher, I think it’s so elemental. Like, I want to show them my love. I want to embrace them.

MAUGHAN: So, here’s something interesting — and maybe not super scientifically based, but I think interesting in terms of what you’re talking about. First, there was this world-renowned family therapist named Virginia Satir, and she would always advocate, “We need four hugs a day for survival, we need eight hugs a day for maintenance, and 12 hugs a day for growth.” That was kind of her thing.

DUCKWORTH: Wait, is this, like, in the old days? Is she contemporary? I haven’t heard of her.

MAUGHAN: She died in 1988.

DUCKWORTH: Ah, okay, okay. Four, eight, 12.

MAUGHAN: Four for survival, eight for maintenance, 12 for growth. Now here’s a more contemporary person, Christy Kane, who is a keynote speaker and clinical mental health counselor. So again, I don’t know there’s a ton of science but just her experience. She talks about the need for eight-second hugs, eight times a day. And she specifically talks about this mostly between parent and child. And there was a journalist named Carmen Rasmusen Herbert who went and heard Christy Kane speak and then started this experiment of trying the eight-second hugs eight times a day with her kids. And this is what she wrote in the end. She said, “I feel I’m behind and lacking in so many areas, particularly when it comes to parenting. I get frustrated and tired and burned out, and I wonder if what I’m doing is making a difference. But when I’m holding my children, that all goes away. I don’t think about my insecurities, my failures, or my worries. During those eight seconds, all I feel is comfort, contentment, and concern for that person and connection.” And so I love this concept. Again, I don’t know the science behind it, but with or without it, I think that’s kind of beautiful.

DUCKWORTH: You’re like, “I don’t even care if there’s science behind it.”

MAUGHAN: I don’t care if it’s true, it works!

DUCKWORTH: Okay, there is some research — actually there’s a lot of research — on physical touch and relationships. And there is so much research that just this year, there was a meta-analysis. That’s, like, a systematic review. You kind of, like, average together all the statistics that have been accumulating across all these different studies. And it was published in Nature Human Behaviour, which is a tippy-top journal, so it’s extremely credible. And, in total, there were about 13,000 people involved in interventions, actually. They’re called “touch interventions.” I don’t think the eight seconds, eight times a day hug intervention was studied. In fact, most of the interventions lasted five minutes or more.

MAUGHAN: Wait, a five-minute hug? That’s called cuddling.  

DUCKWORTH: Exactly! I was like, “Wait, we — we need another word for that.” But they were mostly not hugging interventions. It actually spanned the entire lifespan, too. So, you can look at the importance of touch through these experimental interventions — because the whole point of these interventions was just to see is there really a causal role of touch. Is it just this thing that people are doing, or is it actually doing something to you? So, you can look at babies, you can look at adulthood. And the typical adult touch intervention was massage. Like, a 20-minute massage, for example. And I was like, “Yes, please?” Like, I was like, “Oh, now these findings make sense.”

MAUGHAN: Twenty minutes? 60 to 90 minutes, please. What are you talking about?

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, I know, right? But anyway, I will just say that the most common intervention for adults was massages of reasonable duration. And then for babies, it was kangaroo care. You, you know what that is, right? Kangaroo care.

MAUGHAN: Yes, so can I just say that I was talking to my niece, and this is hilarious, because we were talking about physical touch, and she’s 16 years old. And I said, “Yeah, have you ever heard of kangaroo care?” And you know what she went to immediately? She’s like, “Yes, there was an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where there was a premature baby whose parents had died. And Alex Karev, who’s a doctor in Grey’s Anatomy, took off his shirt and held the baby skin-to-skin” and dah, dah, dah. And I said, “Did you like it because you learned about kangaroo care or because Dr. Karev took his shirt off?” And she started blushing, she’s like, “Well, I mean, it didn’t hurt that Karev took his shirt off.” Anyway — 

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, a little of both.

MAUGHAN: But it’s this idea of skin-to-skin touch with a caregiver, right?

DUCKWORTH: Yeah. So, not as fun to think about as a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy taking their shirt off, but in these random assignment experiments, I have to say, the magnitude of the effects are really large. Like, they’re a lot larger than anything that I’ve ever gotten out of an intervention study. And so there is this highly reliable, sizable effect of being touched. And what was interesting to me is there was about the same benefit for babies and adults.

MAUGHAN: Oh, what?  

DUCKWORTH: I know, right? I mean, what they were looking at in babies was different from adults. So, typically in adults, they were looking at feelings of depression or anxiety or, I think there was also feelings of pain. But with babies, they were looking at, for example, how much the baby gained weight, and then also I think levels of stress hormones. Anyway, it’s not exactly apples to apples, but the effect of touch was comparable. I mean, really, that bowled me over because I guess I would’ve thought it did matter more for younger — 

MAUGHAN: I would have thought so for sure. 

DUCKWORTH: Like, “Do we outgrow our need for touch?” Like, “Of course! We get grown up.” But maybe not.

MAUGHAN: I was reading something by the World Health Organization, which they published in 2022, with these new guidelines to improve the survival and health outcomes for premature babies. And they actually talk about now, the recommendation is to go immediately to skin-to-skin care, even before putting a child in an incubator or anything else. And they are saying that that shows greater outcomes for children than even going into an incubator. And so, they’ve kind of changed the guidelines for premature babies to go immediately to skin-to-skin care. 

DUCKWORTH: Well, this explains so much because I did go — I’m just kidding, but I did go directly into an incubator. So, I have this photo that my parents must have taken, like, through the plate glass of the hospitals. I was a breech birth. Like, you’re supposed to come out headfirst, and I was feet first. This is 1970 so, I don’t know, maybe we’ve gotten better at these kind of births. But I aspirated the amniotic fluid. And so, I had pneumonia, like, immediately because I had fluid in my lungs. I wasn’t a preemie, but I had to go into this incubator — I’m guessing, like, immediately. I’m not saying this is why my parents didn’t touch anything, it’s more that they grew up in China, which is an outlier in low touch. But that new practice of immediately when a baby’s born, whenever possible, you put them directly on the mother’s chest — that’s what happened when Amanda and Lucy were born. And I think the arguments are that all kinds of hormones start cascading when you have that skin-to-skin contact. It’s like a programmed script of sort of like, “You’re safe, you’re loved.” And I, I have to say, there is that speculation that even among adults, there’s a kind of, like, oxytocin flow. And there’s a bonding. Like, my therapist once was like, “Hey, Angela, I’m going to remind you that you have a body below your neck.” And I think the reason why my therapist wanted to remind me of this was like, I can be a little cerebral and was like, thinking, thinking, thinking.

MAUGHAN: You? No!

DUCKWORTH: Me? What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. But you know, touch is like a basic sense. We have sight. We have hearing. We have smell. And we have touch. When we touch another person, it is a signal that — again, the kinds of touch we’re talking about — like, “you’re safe, you belong, you’re loved.” So it, in a way, makes total sense that even from the very first moment of life you would need it. Maybe what we need reminding is, like, turns out we need it the rest of life, too.

MAUGHAN: It never goes away.

DUCKWORTH: Well, Mike, I think you and I would both love to hear how NSQ listeners feel about the significance of physical touch. Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone, and email us at NSQ@freakonomics.com. Maybe we’ll play it on a future episode of the show. And if you like the show and want to support us, the very best thing you can do is to tell a friend about it. You can also spread the word on social media or leave a review in your favorite podcast app. 

Still to come on No Stupid Questions: why does touch have such a positive impact on well-being?

DUCKWORTH: “Oh, I’m loved. Got it.”

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Now, back to Mike and Angela’s conversation about physical touch.

MAUGHAN: Angela, I want to share with you — I actually don’t want to share it with you, but I’m going to share with you a slightly vulnerable story about a hug.

DUCKWORTH: Mmm, I love it when you get vulnerable, Mike, because I don’t think you really like getting vulnerable.

MAUGHAN: I know, and maybe my version of vulnerable is different than other people’s, but it feels vulnerable to me. So, the Utah Jazz hosted the All-Star Game in 2023. And during that week, it’s absolute madness the entire time. We’re running from event to event to event. You have no downtime because it’s just that busy. And it’s, you know, an All-Star weekend, so it’s several days, plus it’s months and months preparing for it. And right before the actual All-Star Game on Sunday, there was the first time I really had, like, a two-hour break or something. And I met up with a few friends, and we were going to head over to the All-Star Game. And one of my friends gave me a hug. And then continued to hold me and squeezed me very tightly. And I had never had this experience before, but I realized in that moment, I felt like everything in me was falling apart. Like, I was barely hanging on. I’d made it to the end of months of preparation and this incredibly grueling week. And I got this, again, very platonic hug from someone who’s like a brother, but it felt like he was actually, like, holding me — 

DUCKWORTH: Like, physically holding you together.

MAUGHAN: Putting me back together. Yes. And I’d never had that physical or emotional response before. And it honestly changed how I viewed a hug, because I, I literally in that moment remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, this isn’t just a hug or like a, ‘hey buddy,’ or whatever. I am being physically held together when I feel like I’m about to fall apart.” But it was not, like, a two-minute hug. This is probably, like, 20 seconds. But it was enough that it had that both physical and mental experience for me.

DUCKWORTH: Well, I do want to say of that meta-analysis that was published that includes, like, all of the touch interventions, that what they found was the driver of how much of a benefit you would get was less about the duration and more about the frequency. So just translating this into practical advice, it’s like, “Hug often, but not necessarily for longer.” That said, the kind of thing that you’re talking about — and I know what you mean. It’s not happened to me very often at all, but very occasionally someone will hug you longer than the socially normal — because a hug is usually like, what? Like a second or something? It’s like, “Hug. Over.” I’m thinking about a funeral that I went to when — I think it was my first funeral. I was, I think, in second grade or third grade — like, old enough to be taken to a funeral. It was, like, a friend of the family and they had lost a child that was around my siblings’ age, so older than me. And I’m standing in line and we’re all, like, greeting the family, and I remember the father hugged me and was sobbing, but held me longer than a second or two. And just kept holding. Of course, I couldn’t process what was going on. But I never forgot it. And so these hugs of slightly longer duration can be extremely meaningful because they are, I think, signaling something from one person to the other. They’re not just random. I feel like what researchers need to do is a more systematic study of the kind of thing that we normally think about. I couldn’t find research on, like, eight-second hugs versus two-second hugs. And I actually couldn’t find a lot of hugging interventions. Most of these are like, massage for adults or kangaroo care for babies. I think it’s a really interesting idea.

MAUGHAN: Have you heard of this concept of “skin hunger”?

DUCKWORTH: No.

MAUGHAN: So, I was reading some stuff by a journalist named Sirin Kale about what some psychologists term “skin hunger,” and it’s this need for physical human contact, not a sexual need, but just need for physical human contact And, you know, the elderly have this debilitating effect of skin hunger because they may need prolonged physical contact more than younger generations because the older you are, the more fragile you are physically. So, contact becomes increasingly important for good health.

DUCKWORTH: You know, people are like, “Oh, we need to be more connected.” I mean, this is the most primitive way in which people can connect, like, physically.

MAUGHAN: Yeah, I was going to say, if you’re short on your eight hugs, maybe go to a long-term care facility where people need physical contact, and you can do a service as well. 

DUCKWORTH: I think what we’re saying is, you know, “Maybe from birth to death, we need to touch and be touched,” with consent. I mean, the study that leaps to mind in terms of this elemental need to be in contact with each other. It was done a while ago, so there were only 109 men and 74 women in it. So it wasn’t, like, the hugest study ever. But what they did was they brought people into the lab, and you were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. So, these are all adults, and they were actually brought into the lab as couples. And half of the couples were asked to hold each other’s hands for 10 minutes and watch a romantic video together. And then you’re asked to hug your partner for 20 seconds.

MAUGHAN: Okay. So, long duration. 

DUCKWORTH: So that’s the treatment condition, and the control condition is that you and your partner sit quietly and rest for 10 minutes and 20 seconds. So, no video, no hand-holding instructions, and no 20-second hug. So that’s the experimental design. And then what happens is that you’re asked to do a public speaking task, which for most human beings — present company excluded perhaps — but for most human beings, it’s, like, very stressful. It’s like a classic way of inducing stress in people in psychology. You just ask them to stand up and give a speech. And then what they recorded was blood pressure and heart rate. And they were looking to see, “What is the effect of warm contact with your romantic partner?” And what they found was that for both men and women, this hand-holding and the hug kind of inoculated you against the stress, because they could see these people in the high-touch condition had less of a heart rate increase, you know, their blood pressure didn’t go up as much. It’s not that they didn’t feel stress at all. And it did make me realize that — you know, like, when you watch in these movies, and the mom hugs the athlete before they go out on the field — I really do think there is this very primitive kind of like, “Oh, I’m loved. Got it. Now I can go off and do something hard or be in an uncomfortable position.”

MAUGHAN: You know what I think is interesting is this evolutionary idea. There is a professor named Kory Floyd who is a communications professor, at University of Arizona, but he talked about, through an evolutionary lens, if we look at how dangerous it was to be shunned from your community or separated from the pack, it just makes sense that any sort of touch deprivation would register as a threat, where anything like you’re talking about — this comforting, unifying, loving touch registers as security, which then you go out into the stressful environment, and you’re not faced with the same level of response in the body.

DUCKWORTH: So, there’s some evidence of that from primates. Have you ever heard of Harry Harlow?

MAUGHAN: No. But it’s a great name, alliterative and wonderful.

DUCKWORTH: Harry Harlow, professor of psychology at University of Wisconsin. So, Harry Harlow was the mastermind behind these very creative experiments on primates, like monkeys. Now, I have to say that in present day, Harry Harlow might have been canceled because he was really interested in the nature of love and actually his most famous article is called, “The Nature of Love.” And it’s not a study of people; it’s a study of infant monkeys. So what Harry Harlow did was he raised these infant monkeys in rooms in isolation of their moms. I think also in isolation from each other. So, it’s sort of like solitary confinement childhood for these infant monkeys. And he made two moms, like mom dolls, one out of wire, but the mom that was made out of cold metal wire had the milk. So, there was like a little bottle that the infant monkey could nurse from. And so that was the mom that represented meeting your basic survival needs. And then there was another mom who had nothing to give you in terms of nutrition, but was covered with, like, soft terry cloth. And the question was, “When you observe these infant monkeys, what do they do?” Well, indeed, the monkeys go to the wire mom that has the milk. You know, they go and, like, they feed. And them they go right back to the comforting mom, who has nothing to give you other than (ALD^Laughs) their — their soft, quote, unquote “embrace.” And what Harry Harlow concluded was that we don’t just need our basic needs to be met. There is a primitive instinct for love. We want that tenderness. And now we know that it’s elemental. So, that very early study was about — not exactly hugs and embraces, but there was this idea that touch is, like, the most primitive way that we know that we are in a safe place and that we are cared for. I told you that in my own childhood I didn’t get a lot of it. For me it was not unnormal. But when I had Amanda and Lucy, I have to say that when they were really little, they were babies, right? So, you’re touching them all the time. You’re, like, literally holding them, right. Then when they got older, I did notice that these other moms hugged their kids more. I mean, Jason hugged them more. I was like, “Hmm, maybe I should hug my kids more.” And as they got really old, like, as in they’re young women now, I do hug them a lot, but it’s not how I was raised. So, it is a little bit like, “I’m now going to hug Lucy. Now I’m going to hug Amanda.” It’s not as instinctive to me, given my own upbringing.

MAUGHAN: I also read something about touch that kind of goes along with this, which is that in all of the senses that we have, we tend to — and I don’t know if this is, again, scientific but suggested by this professor of philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, Ophelia Deroy — that there’s a truthfulness in touch. That we actually believe touch. So, you always say, like, “I couldn’t believe my eyes” or “I wasn’t sure if I saw that exactly.” But we actually believe touch more. And so whether that’s the hug of a parent to a child — you can say, “I love you.” But there’s a truthfulness to touch where I feel that love in the hug. 

DUCKWORTH: “Tangible evidence” is a phrase we use, right? Tangible means touch. And I took this one class when I was an undergraduate called “Sensory Transduction,” and that is just a very fancy, multisyllabic way of saying that all organisms — even the most primitive — have to sense the world. “Like, am I in danger? Am I in safety? Is there food here? Like, is that a predator? What’s going on?” And this is true for human beings, but also, it’s true of, like, a single-celled organism. It also needs to know like, “What’s going on? Should I be over here or over there?” So this class was really interesting because one of the senses that all living organisms have is touch. Even the most primitive single-celled organisms, like a paramecium, it knows when it runs into an obstacle. So, this idea that touch is honest information about the world — you know, we have this expression, “Seeing is believing.” Maybe we should have it kind of like, “Touching is believing.”

MAUGHAN: Right! Touching is the thing, maybe, that we trust the most out of all of our senses. 

DUCKWORTH: Mike, to close out this conversation, going back to Kristen’s question, you know, “Can babies die if they don’t receive physical touch? Is physical touch a basic need for adults as well?” I have to say that, Kristen, there’s not a lot of research on whether babies will die if they’re not physically touched because there are no babies who get no physical touch. But I think the kangaroo care research is really clear that it’s really a good thing for us, from the very first moment of existence, to be in skin-to-skin contact with other people, especially parents, it turns out, research shows, but a doctor from Grey’s Anatomy ripping off their shirt to expose their well-developed pecs probably also doesn’t hurt. And to me, the most striking finding that only you led us to, Kristen, was just this idea that we need it even after we’re babies. My gut intuition says that if you just think about our normal diet of touch, where you probably don’t get the prolonged hug — I think, I wouldn’t myself recommend a certain duration. But I do think, like, a memorable prescription — and that’s the beauty of a number like eight — if you tell people, like, “Oh, you should hug a lot,” they’re like, “Okay, whatever.” But if you’re like, “Eight hugs a day,” it gives them a really specific goal.

MAUGHAN: Right, we love to measure things. We love to feel successful because we can check it off the list. 

DUCKWORTH: We love goals that have numbers. We love, like, seven-day challenges. I don’t know, the eight hug a day challenge? I’m willing to do it, Mike. Are you willing — well, okay, first of all, do you think that would be a good thing? Like, if you got hugged eight times a day? Because I would literally get a piece of paper and a pen and make a little chart, and I would be willing to challenge you and myself to get eight hugs a day. I mean, if we want to be all catchy, maybe, like, the “eight hug a day, eight-day challenge.”

MAUGHAN: For eight seconds? Are we going “eight-eight-eight”? 

DUCKWORTH: Oh God, eight seconds. I don’t really want to have an eight-second hug. 

MAUGHAN: I don’t either. 

DUCKWORTH: It’s a little long for me.

MAUGHAN: I mean, I do if it’s with someone that I love, but that’s weird elsewhere.

DUCKWORTH: I just think my mind would wander. I would be like, “Oh, you smell.” How about we say, “a hug of any duration”? Because we’re in charge, right? Like, we’re making the rules, and there’s no science. Like, eight hugs a day for eight days? I don’t know, what do you think about that?

MAUGHAN: I’m in —

DUCKWORTH: Would that be a challenge for you? Or are you already getting eight hugs a day? 

MAUGHAN: No, I’m probably not. I don’t know. I’ll do it.

DUCKWORTH: Can we make the ground rule that it doesn’t have to be eight different people?

MAUGHAN: Yes, of course. And we’ll make the ground rule that it is always with consent.

DUCKWORTH: Okay, good. And then, finally —  you know how, like, people because they want to get their 10,000 steps in, like, walk around in circles in their basement at the end of the night.   

MAUGHAN: Right, you can’t just hug Jason eight times really quickly?

DUCKWORTH: I want to put another ground rule in, is there has to be a separation in time of like, I don’t know, what do you think a good separation would be? So that you don’t just have, like, “hug, hug, hug, hug, hug, okay, great, I’m done.” You know what I mean? 

MAUGHAN: One per hour. I don’t know. Half-hour? 

DUCKWORTH: Can I go half-hour? 

MAUGHAN: Half-hour’s perfect. Done. 

DUCKWORTH: There has to be a half-hour between reps.

MAUGHAN: I agree to the terms.

DUCKWORTH: Eight. Oh, that’s a lot. You know what this is going to mean, Mike? We’re going to have to hug people that —

MAUGHAN: That we don’t know super well sometimes. 

DUCKWORTH: Yeah! And I think that challenge starts now.

MAUGHAN: Today. Hugs away.

And now, here’s a fact-check of today’s conversation:

Mike refers to Carmen Rasmusen Herbert as a journalist. On her LinkedIn profile, Rasmusen Herbet identifies as a “speaker, singer, songwriter, columnist, author,” and “reality show survivor.” The reality show she survived is American Idol. Rasmusen Herbert finished sixth in the second season of the show in 2003. That year’s winner was Ruben Studdard.

Finally, in describing Harry Harlow’s study of infant monkeys, Angela gets a detail wrong. Some of the monkeys only received milk from the wire mother; another group only received milk from the cloth mother. However, Angela was correct that all of the baby monkeys preferred the cloth mother to the wire mother outside of nursing time.

That’s it for the fact-check.

Before we wrap today’s show, let’s hear some thoughts about last week’s episode on discomfort.

Marissa REINHOLZ: Hi, this is Marissa from Wisconsin, but now living in Norway. When I was 16, I chose to be an exchange student with AFS for one school year in Norway. The first few months was spent in a blur of confusion and discomfort as I didn’t know a lot of the cultural norms and I couldn’t speak or understand the language. But it was during that year when I persevered through the discomfort and took risks that I learned just how capable I am as a person. I now live in Norway with my Norwegian husband and our three kids. And I work a job where I publicly speak in Norwegian every day. On days when I feel like I can’t communicate as well as I’d like, I remind myself that having an accent is not a sign of lack of intelligence, but is instead a mark of bravery. 

Meghan O’SULLIVAN: Hi Angela and Mike, my name is Megan and I’m from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  Tree planting in Canada is a very difficult, uncomfortable, grueling job. You live out in the wilderness with no cell service, no running water, nothing, and it really pushes you to your limits. I never thought I’d be able to plant 4, 000 trees a day, and I managed to do that when I leaned into the discomfort. However, I have a chronic shoulder injury now, because I leaned a little bit too hard and I didn’t listen to when the discomfort turned into pain. So, discomfort, I do think, is a good thing for us to endure. But, we gotta listen when it turns into pain.

That was, respectively, Marissa Reinholz and Meghan O’Sullivan. Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us. And remember, we’d love to hear your thoughts about the importance of physical touch. Send a voice memo to NSQ@Freakonomics.com, and you might hear your voice on the show!

Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions: What are the effects of complete isolation on human behavior?

MAUGHAN: “There was no end and no beginning. There is only one’s mind, which can begin to play tricks.”

That’s coming up on No Stupid Questions.

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No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Julie Kanfer. The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lyric Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Rippin. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter @NSQ_Show and on Facebook @NSQShow. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ@Freakonomics.com. To learn more, or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com/NSQ. Thanks for listening!

MAUGHAN: Yep, I wore my underwear on the outside.