How shaking someone’s hand really can seal the deal – and why giving your friends, family and colleagues a pat on the back will give your social status and career path a boost .

In the vainglorious digital world in which we now, unfortunately, exist, it’s easy to float around puffed up with a sense of one’s own power, buoyed perhaps by the number of Instagram followers, or the amount of times you’ve got your way in the office. But what is power, exactly? And is it good for us? In The Power Paradox, a new book by Mr Dacher Keltner (a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley), the author dismantles the commonly held belief (propagated by the renaissance political philosopher and all-round awful person Mr Niccolò Machiavelli) that being powerful is all about stepping on shoulders, stabbing backs and generally trying to get one-over on your friends and colleagues. This, says Mr Keltner, is an old-fashioned set of ideas that, in the modern world, leads not just to unpleasant and irrational behaviour, but an inevitable downfall. In its place, Mr Keltner proposes a different rationale for status and influence, in which power is conferred upon individuals in more of a give-and-take fashion. In fact, he says, power exchanges can have a positive impact on social groups – in short, it’s something everyone should and can strive for. “One of the missions of the book is to free people up from the illusion that power is only money, prestige or position of authority,” says Mr Keltner. “People without these things have enormous influence upon the world... And, in general, the more people are empowered, and striving for power, in groups, relationships, families, communities, the healthier those social entities are. By contrast, power imbalances that take the shape of inequality tend to be problematic for social entities.”

In the below excerpt from the book, which is out now from Allen Lane, Mr Keltner explains how physical touch plays a major part in exchanges of power. Take a read, and then pat your closest colleague on the back. It’s a real rush, we assure you.

Making sense of touch

The president of the United States shakes the hands of an estimated 65,000 people every year (about 200 per day). On the campaign trail, candidates’ hands are often swollen and reddened from touching the body politic. But something deep is at play in this political ritual: touching, and being touched, is one of the simplest and oldest ways in which people provide rewards to others, a basis of enduring power.

Non-human primates spend upward of 15 per cent of their waking hours grooming one another. They do so not to find nits or gnats or curb the spread of disease, but to provide delight and, thereby, form alliances.

In humans, too, touch is a powerful, direct, and evolutionarily old means of giving to others. A reassuring pat on the back or warm embrace elicits in the recipient the release of oxytocin, a neurochemical that promotes trust, cooperation and sharing. A soft touch to the arm activates the orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the frontal lobes that represents rewards in the environment and actions to attain them. Warm, friendly touches of appreciation make others feel esteemed, valued and good. Touch is a powerful incentive within social interactions.

Warm, friendly patterns of touch also calm the neurophysiology of stress – elevated cortisol and blood pressure. Simply holding the hand of a loved one deactivates the stress-related regions of the brain when the person is anticipating a stressful experience, such as an electric shock. Babies going through a medical procedure cried less when a loved one touched them. Like empathy, the right kind of touch advances the greater good in social interactions, enhancing the rewards that others feel and diminishing their stress.

Given this science of the rewarding and calming effects of friendly touch, I turned to a favourite pastime – basketball – to test the hypothesis that touch would empower others working together and make for greater collaboration and better performance. The participants in my study were NBA players. At the onset of the 2008 season, my Berkeley research team began coding all the observed touches in an entire game of every team in the NBA. Over seven months, we coded more than 25 kinds of touch, from the proverbial high-fives and fist bumps, to bear hugs and embraces.

On average, each player touched his teammates for about two seconds during a game. Just two seconds.

But those brief touches mattered, leading the teams to play more cohesively later in the season. My statistical analyses found that the more a team’s players touched one another at the beginning of the season, the better the team played at the season’s end, as assessed by the most sophisticated basketball metrics.

The Power Paradox: How We Gain And Lose Influence (Allen Lane) by Mr Dacher Keltner is out now