A handshake is a global brief greeting or parting tradition in which two people grasp one of each other’s hands.
In most cases, it is accompanied by a brief up-and-down movement of the grasped hands.
Customs surrounding handshakes are specific to cultures.
Different cultures may be more or less likely to shake hands.
For different cultures there may be different customs about how or when to shake hands.
The handshake is commonly done upon meeting, greeting, parting, offering congratulations, expressing gratitude, or as a public sign of completing a business or diplomatic agreement.
In sports, the handshake is also done as a sign of good sportsmanship, expressing its purpose is to convey trust, respect, balance, and equality.
The handshake is done to form an agreement, the agreement is not official until the hands are parted.
Handshake is made usually with bare hands.
Handshaking is common in business situations. In casual non-business situations, men are more likely to shake hands than women.
A traditional handshake is firm, executed with the right hand, with good posture and eye contact, where both parties are standing up is deemed as good etiquette.
A grip that is too firm is rude.
Some people prefer a fist bump, to a handshake but is more casual,
Typically the fist bump is done with a clenched hand.
The fist bump is typically not used to seal a business deal or in formal business settings.
The hand hug is a type of handshake popular with politicians, as it can present them as being warm, friendly, trustworthy and honest.
Handshakes are known to spread a number of microbial pathogens.
A medical study has found that fist bumps and high fives spread fewer germs than handshakes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries and organizations adopted policies encouraging people to use alternative modes of greeting instead of a handshake.
Chemosignaling with human handshakes may serve as a means of transferring social chemical signals between the shakers.
There is a tendency to bring the shaken hands to the vicinity of the nose and smell them, which may serve an evolutionary need to learn about the person whose hand was shaken, replacing a more overt sniffing behavior, as is common among animals and in certain human cultures.