A Touchy Subject

What’s the difference between a reluctant student and an eager student? Hint: it might also be the difference between a bad basketball team and a good one, and Mariah Carey understands it really well.

This article in the New York Times posits that we are all soft, soft putty; even the slightest touch dents us. Literally. Amidst a lot of neat research was this cool bit about basketball teams in the NBA:

“In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.”

The article went on to give Kevin Garnett of the Celtics the Most Touchy Player award, who “within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw…has reached out and touched four guys.”

The most touchy arenas in our lives have got to be the sports ones, which got me thinking that the Olympics, if I ever get around to watching them, would be a phenomenal experiment.  Some cultures are inherently more physically affectionate than others.  If touching can make a difference even at the level of professional basketball, why wouldn’t it make a difference in the cohesion of an Olympic team.

–Trisha Jain