The effect of incidental haptic sensations on intrapersonal judgements on a personality questionnaire

Extant research has shown that incidental haptic sensations can, nonconsciously, influence judgements of objects or people that are non-diagnostic (unrelated) for the actual qualities of the items being judged - including interpersonal judgements. Evidence suggests that this could also be true for intrapersonal judgements. The application of this conception to the use of personality questionnaires lead to the following hypothesis: incidental exposure to a specific haptic experience (firmness or flimsiness of the paper) could, nonconsciously, trigger physically grounded mental frameworks, which, in turn, may effect the intrapersonal judgements of individuals completing a personality questionnaire. A randomized post-test only, one-way experimental design was conducted using a sample of university students (n = 178). The experiment found evidence to support the hypothesis that a physically grounded mental framework, consistent with embodied cognition, could nonconsciously lead participants to form stronger self-judgements on agreeableness and extraversion, when encountering an incidental haptic experience of firmness in a personality questionnaire. The findings of this research may serve to create awareness of the influence of incidental haptic sensations as a confounding variable in questionnaire design. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.