Given a permutation $σ$ on $n$ symbols $\{0, 1, \ldots, n-1\}$ and an integer $1 \leq m \leq n-1$, the $m$th contraction of $σ$ is the permutation $σ^{{\sf CT}^m}$ on $n-m$ symbols obtained by deleting the symbols $n-1, n-2, \ldots, n-m$ from the cycle decomposition of $σ$. The Hamming distance ${\rm hd}(σ,τ)$ between two permutations $σ$ and $τ$ is the number of symbols $x$ such that $σ(x) \neq τ(x)$. In this paper we give a complete characterization of the effect of a single contraction on the Hamming distance between two permutations. This allows us to obtain sufficient conditions for ${\rm hd}(σ,τ)-{\rm hd}(σ^{{\sf CT}^m},τ^{{\sf CT}^m})\leq 2m$.