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Westerners consider shaking hands as a very positive behaviour: Study

People staying in the western countries consider “shaking of hands” as a very positive behaviour than the people staying in the East Asian countries as shown by a recent study.

“Shaking hands is an inherently behaviour custom in the West in the context of the business, and it is also ahs been a historical behaviour of the males,” stated Yuta Katsumi who is a graduate student pursuing studies at the University of Illinois- Urbana-Champaign.

Studies that were made previously, reported in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 88 Western and East Asian and people were given short videos of various series of movies to watch which illustrated the interactions between the host and the guest in a business setup.

The characters in the movies either did not shake hands and begun their interaction or shook hands ate the starting of the meeting.

After watching every video, the participants of the study were asked regarding how interested they would feel to do business with the host of the business and to what extent he or she seems to be competent.

The outcomes indicated that the participants in the West had evaluations which were positive regarding the social interactions that involve handshakes in comparison to the people from the East Asia.

Moreover, the men and women from the West were also found to be evaluating the circumstances very differently. Western women specified all the interactions with the handshakes more optimistically than those without handshakes.

On the other hand, Western men assessed the male hosts in a less positive way when they did not shake hands. However, they assessed the female hosts equivalently positive in spite of whether a handshake was involved or not.

“Our findings show that in the males from the West, there is a clear expectation for shaking hands during the initial encounters with other males. However, they simply don’t seem to affect by handshake’s absence during an interaction with a female,” stated Dflorin Duclos, Professor at the University of Illinois.

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