Being touchy-feely isn't just nice – caresses build social worlds from families to sports teams and may even give us our sense of self
FIST bumps and bum slaps, high fives and back pats – most sports teams can't keep their hands off each other. Watch a group of players on a winning streak and you'll see a lot of touching. Keep a tally and it might even give you a way to pick the champions. The teams at the top of the rankings at the end of the US National Basketball Association season, for example, engage in more hands-on interaction from the start than those who ended up at the bottom, according to work by a group at the University of California, Berkeley. Not only does touch seem to signal trust and cooperation, it creates them.
Examples like this are ...
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