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Handshaking, Gender, Personality, and First Impressions
ABSTRACT
Although peoples handshakes are thought to reflect their personality and influence our first impressions of them, these relations have seldom been formally investigated. ... There were also gender differences on most of the handshaking characteristics. ... The pattern of relations among openness, gender, handshaking, and first impressions suggests that a firm handshake may be an effective form of self-promotion for women. ... edu
Received: November 8, 1999
Revised: February 7, 2000
Accepted: February 7, 2000
Handshaking is a common greeting behavior and is often one of the first observations that individuals make of each other upon meeting. ... Although handshakes are anecdotally believed to communicate information about a persons personality, little systematic research has been done on the relation between handshaking and personality. Indeed, the extent to which handshaking is sufficiently stable across time and consistent across situations to reflect stable individual differences is largely unknown. Handshaking has also historically been more common among men than it has been among women or between men and women. However, we know little about gender differences in handshaking characteristics or about how gender may be involved in relations between personality, initial impressions, and handshaking. The purpose of the present research is to assess the generalizability of some characteristics of handshaking behavior across time and gender; to test some hypotheses about the relations among handshaking dimensions, personality, and gender; and to evaluate the relation between handshaking dimensions and initial impressions formed about strangers.
Characteristics of Handshaking
Handshakes can differ in a variety of ways. There is an extensive literature on handshaking in books on etiquette (e. ... Within the scientific literature, the only serious mention of handshaking characteristics can be found in the classic work by Allport and Vernon (1933, p. ...
Handshaking has historically been viewed as a male activity. Although probably apocryphal, legends about handshaking imply that the custom originated to provide a signal between male combatants that they would be nonaggressive ( Eichler, 1937). Regardless of the accuracy of these legends, books on etiquette have clearly emphasized a gender difference in handshaking (e. ...
Handshaking and Personality
There is a widespread belief that an individuals handshake reveals much about that persons personality. ... The predictions about the relation between handshaking characteristics and personality traits made by experts on the etiquette of handshaking have a compelling face validity. However, there has been little systematic empirical study of the handshaking-personality relation. ... Indeed, a search of literature revealed only three articles, all studies conducted in Sweden by the same first author, that empirically address the relation between personality traits and handshaking characteristics. ... The final study ( Astroem & Thorell, 1996) did not directly assess handshaking-personality relations, but was based on interviews with 47 individuals (therapists, clergyman, and car salesmen) who were thought to be experienced at engaging in and interpreting handshaking. ...
Handshaking and First Impressions
Regardless of any empirical support for a relation between handshaking and personality, it is generally believed that the handshake is an important component of the first impression that one forms of a person. ... com) that advertise proper handshaking as a component in their curriculum. However, empirical studies of the relation between handshaking characteristics and the initial impression or evaluation of a person are lacking. ...
The Present Study
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 in the literature on handshaking etiquette. We selected eight characteristics of handshaking that were frequently mentioned or implied by the existing literature. ...
On the basis of the handshaking literature and the findings of Astroem and his colleagues (Astroem, 1994; Astroem & Thorell, 1996; Astroem et al. ... The view that good handshakes communicate sociability, friendliness, and dominance, whereas poor handshakes communicate social introversion, shyness, and neuroticism led us to select the Big Five Factors of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience as possible correlates of handshaking. ... (1993) reported some reliability in the assessment of handshaking dimensions, his studies did not include a systematic assessment of handshakes across time or situations. ... We expected the texture of mens handshakes to be rougher than womens, but on the basis of the general literature about eye contact (e. ...
A third goal of this study is to assess the relation between personality characteristics and handshaking characteristics. We intend to assess these relations in general, but on the basis of Astroems (1994) finding that some of the relations between handshaking characteristics and personality differed for men and women, we will also consider the moderating effect of gender on these relations. In addition, because the handshake coders were aware of the participants gender while evaluating the handshakes, we will also assess the relation between handshaking and personality after statistically controlling for gender. ...
Our final goal is to assess the relation between a persons handshaking characteristics and the initial impression that person makes on others. ... Because of the influence of general factors, such as evaluation, on ratings of strangers (e. ... We will thus consider combining the ratings on different dimensions into more general composites reflecting an overall positive or negative impression of the participant. ... Thus, they were not blind to the general hypotheses about the relation between personality and handshaking characteristics. ... One dimension concerned General Affect, ranging from 1 (negative) to 5 (positive). ... Raters practiced their handshaking technique on each other and on other individuals until we were satisfied that each had mastered the technique.
The next phase of training was understanding the eight handshaking dimensions included in the study and attaining agreement about those dimensions on handshakes that varied on the dimensions. ...
The purpose of this description was to provide a cover story for why the participants would be administered four brief questionnaires by four separate experimenters and why so much handshaking would occur. ... No participants indicated any suspiciousness about the handshaking. ...
Correlations Among the Handshaking Dimensions
Table 2 shows the correlations among the average of the eight ratings for the eight handshaking dimensions. ... Analyses of the individual handshaking dimensions are available from William F. ...
Gender Differences in Handshaking
To assess gender differences in handshaking we considered the gender of the participant, the gender of the coder, and their interaction in a 2 x 2 mixed analysis of variance. ...
Handshaking and Personality
Correlations between the personality scales and the handshaking dimensions. ...
The effect of controlling for gender on the handshaking-personality relation. ...
The moderating effect of participant gender on the personality-handshaking relation.
We also considered the possibility that the relation between personality and handshaking characteristics would be different for men and women. We evaluated the moderating effect of gender on the personality-handshaking relation by using hierarchical regression analysis to assess the contribution of the partialled product of Gender x Firm Handshake (with gender and firm handshake controlled) to predicting each of the nine personality variables. ...
Handshaking and First Impressions
In addition to rating the handshaking characteristics of the participants, the coders also rated each participants personality on eight dimensions that corresponded to the personality scales the participant had completed. ... As we expected, the coders, who did not know the participants, appear to have based their ratings on a general impression factor, such as evaluation. ... We also found that five of the eight handshaking characteristics that we studied covaried. These five characteristics (strength, vigor, duration, eye contact, and completeness of grip) represent what the literature on handshaking etiquette refers to as a firm handshake, and we focused our analyses on this composite. ... We were concerned that the relation of gender to handshaking and to personality might be the basis for these results. ... This suggests that those aspects of handshaking that are related to gender are not the basis for handshakings relation to these personality variables. Indeed, for extraversion, shyness, and emotional expressiveness, gender operates to suppress some of the handshaking variance that is unrelated to these characteristics.
Only the relation between neuroticism and handshaking can be partially explained by a mutual association with gender. Finally, we also found that the general relation between Openness and a firm handshake is complicated by a moderating effect of gender. ...
Regardless of the accuracy of the impressions formed about individuals on the basis of their handshake, the literature on handshaking etiquette and business protocol strongly suggests that a handshake has a substantial impact on how people evaluate others. ... Instead these ratings seem to be influenced by the general first impression the coders formed of the participants, who were strangers to the coders. This general impression factor precluded us from exploring the accuracy of the coders impressions at predicting the personality measures. Instead, we formed a First Impression Composite and restricted our analyses of the relation between handshaking and personality inferences to this composite.
Approximate Word count = 7161
Approximate Pages = 28.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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