Research uncovers a disturbing link between affection and manipulation.
Not all hugs are harmless: some are designed to coerce and control, especially when the hugger has psychopathic tendencies.
While hugs and other forms of intimate touch normally soothe the mind, reduce stress and release oxytocin, people with ‘dark triad’ personalities can use them to manipulate their partners into getting what they want.
For example, touch is a way of signalling your power over a person, perhaps even ownership: dominant people tend to touch others when they feel more powerful and the weak allow themselves to be touched.
Touch is also a way of gaining compliance: when touched, people are more likely to agree to requests.
Professor Richard Mattson, the study’s first author, said:
“Not only are you not getting the benefits of touch in these relationships, but the flip side of that is that they are powerful, so they can actually be used in the service of oneself at the expense of the relationship partner.”
When touch turns toxic
The study included over 500 college students who were surveyed about how comfortable they were with being touched and how they used touch themselves with other people.
These questions revealed that those with ‘dark triad’ personality traits — narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy — were more likely to use touch to manipulate their partners.
Professor Mattson said:
“An assumption is that what’s core to these traits is a ‘me, first, you, second’ orientation.
And we were examining this as it manifests in something critically important to relationships, which is how individuals orient toward and exchange affection through touch.
So we thought that that might be a key mechanism in explaining the problems individuals with dark triad traits have in relationships.”
From the perspective of being touched themselves, the results were different for men and women.
Women with dark triad traits were more uncomfortable with being touched, while men who were uncomfortable with closeness did not like being touched.
Professor Mattson said:
“Touch alone could be palliative for situations in which somebody needs support, and we know that has positive downstream effects on health, even if the person finds physical touch aversive.
We can potentially leverage touch in these scenarios in order to have frontline, inexpensive interventions for those who haven’t learned to use touch in healthy, reciprocal ways and instead rely on it for control or self-protection.”
Related
The study was published in the journal Current Psychology (Ives et al., 2025).
