Westerners view hand-shake as a positive behaviour: Study

People living in western countries view "shaking hands" as a more positive behaviour than their counterparts in East Asian countries, a study has showed. "Handshaking is an inherently Western behaviour customary in business contexts, and it's also a historically male behaviour," said Yuta Katsumi, a graduate student at University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign.

Previous studies have revealed that handshaking behaviour positively affects people's first impressions and their evaluations of others. In the new study, reported in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 88 Western and East Asian people were shown short videos of a series of movies illustrating guest-host interactions in a business setting.

The characters either shook hands at the beginning of the meeting or started their interaction without a handshake. After watching each video, the participants were asked how interested they would be in doing business with the video's host and how competent he or she seemed to be. The results indicated that Western participants had more positive evaluations of social interactions involving handshakes as compared to East Asians.