Shaking hands is something that we have done forever, as if it were an instinct when greeting someone. It’s one of those things that we unconsciously do every day, but it seems that we don't really remember why we started doing it. So this begs the question: why do we shake hands at all? I can humorously imagine it being a little awkward the first time some caveman tried shaking hands with a fellow cave dweller. I bet someone got clobbered over the head with a wooden club.
Handshaking is something that can be seen in art as early as the fifth century BCE, but it is something that occurred long before that. Some historians suggest that shaking hands began as a way to show peace between warriors. To shake hands means that your hand is empty and therefore not holding a weapon. It is also symbolic of reaching out to another party.
Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science probed further into this question and found evidence to support the notion that we shake hands as a way to smell the other person. This may seem strange, and you may be saying that you definitely don't shake someone’s hand to smell them. But according to this research and subsequent findings, you may, in fact, be doing this as a means to get a whiff of the person you are greeting.
This study found that “volunteers who shook hands were more likely to sniff their hand, for example by touching their nose… than those who did not shake hands. After the volunteers shook hands with someone of their own gender, they spent more time sniffing their right hand (the one they had used for the handshake). However, after the volunteers shook hands with someone of the opposite gender, they spent more time sniffing their left hand instead.”
The researchers fitted nasal catheters in the volunteers’ noses to be sure that they were actually sniffing their hand and not simply touching the face or nose.
This research suggests that almost immediately after we shake someone’s hand of the same sex, we sniff our right hands to get a whiff of their fragrance. We sniff our left hands when shaking the hands of the opposite gender because we are subliminally checking our own smell after we pass it along to someone else.
Weird, huh?
I have never noticed myself sniffing my palm after shaking hands with someone, but I will definitely try to be a little more aware next time.
