Brain on Sports Podcast: How high-fives and touch drive team success

Can the number of high-fives, hugs and chest-bumps a team exchanges impact its win-loss record? On this week’s episode, Professor Mike Kraus of the Yale School of Management joins the show to discuss his study on the correlation between physical touch and team performance among NBA teams, and how lessons from those findings can be taken off the court and into our business and personal relationships.

This is Your Brain on Sports is a weekly podcast from Sports Illustrated in which SI executive editor Jon Wertheim and Tufts University psychology professor Sam Sommers explore the intersection of sports and human nature—what the world of sports has to teach us about who we are, what we care about and the forces that shape our behavior.

Can the number of high-fives, hugs and chest-bumps a team exchanges impact its win-loss record? Michael Kraus, a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, joins the show to discuss his study on the correlation between physical touch and performance among NBA teams, and how lessons from those findings can be taken off the court and into our business and personal relationships.

Listen below to find out more about this intersection of sports and psychology ahead of the Feb. 2 release of Wertheim and Sommers’s book This Is Your Brain on Sports, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on Stitcher, and check back every week for a new episode.