Researchers in Exploring How Handshakes Affect Society's Perceptions

The researchers are interested in studying the way handshakes effects the way society is brought up by “gender, personality, and first impressions”. There was different type of handshakes, the first one expressed that women who gives “firm” handshakes has a feeling of openness which shows how they can be independent which is valuable when it comes to first impressions and “weak” handshakes that shows to other party is either nervous or just not confident which gives off a bad first impression making it hard for women to be self entitled to get a job on leadership.

The researchers believed that handshakes can reveal a person’s personality and so they measured and divided the handshakes in 8 different characteristics.Categorizing the handshakes by “texture, temperature, dryness, completeness of grip, vigor, strength, eye contact, and duration.”

The theory that has guided in the research was Behaviorism or behavioral psychology (is behavior is the way you act when observed, it’s cognitive, the mood, emotions, etc.

) because the way you give your handshake is the way you give your first impression and the personality. The handshake is the first observation and is also built in the human’s memory whereas the second handshake will add on to the first and will be compared. These were the hypotheses, “…if people tend to answer questionnaires differently depending upon whether the questionnaires are given together in the same packet or administered separately.” “If a participant made a good impression, the participant tended to be rated higher on extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, openness, emotional expression, outgoingness (the opposite of shyness), and positive affect.

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” They represented that if the individual participating in the test or questionnaire if they answers differentiates from other participants it gives them a different result showing if they made any good idea about their personality.

The hypothesis or hypotheses was supported by the “coefficient alphas”. “Our study is designed to overcome some of the limitations of previous research and was guided by the consistent, but untested, beliefs about handshaking that we found is the literature on handshaking etiquettes.” The results that was sustained were basically completion or closure for the previous research giving more ability to collect more data in which previous encounters to the study had less ability to further their beliefs, showing how limited the past research was before. “The purpose of the present research is to assess the generalizability of some characteristics of handshaking behavior across time and gender;” The past research was more about the handshaking gender and time limiting the research when now and more categories looking for individual coders of each gender not just one to see how they rate the handshakes.

The total participants in all case studies combined was 126 participants. The first case study had “29 psychiatric inpatients” (meaning that they are registered in the mental facility) and the second case study had 50 participants, “25 men and 25 women” who were deemed as normal. The participants had to give handshakes to the experimenter who gender was male. The third and final case study was 47 individuals who were viewed as experienced or was based in a professional setting in handshakes differentiating from the previous studies. There was more participants that was in total “112 undergraduates, 48 men and 64 women” who did it for extra credit. and duration.The main results were the handshaking ratings which were based on time, gender, and individual coders. 8 categories overall which was broken up in different quantifications “2 (time) x 2 gender(either male or female) x 2 (individual coders)” scale showing that handshakes are based on either gender by the where the individual coders and gender have similar consistency of testing male or female.

In conclusion, the researchers seemed satisfied with the results of the research claiming that females were more “intelligent” than male since their first handshake was “firm” which they felt was more a male behavior but it was shown that the females were giving the feeling of confidence. “It would be something of an overstatement to claim that a person’s handshake provides a window to his or her soul.” I believe that they felt as if the handshakes were unpredictable because of how different the females vs males were but personality wise they figured out there results and was satisfied with the results and won’t be furthering in the research.