14 DAY TRIAL // Dogs, together with plenty of other creatures, rely a great deal on their sense of smell when it comes to interacting with each other. We humans also use our smell to better know those around us, sometimes even more intensely than we are even aware of.
In fact, researchers with the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel now say that shaking hands could very well be our way of sniffing each other.
The scientists say that, having carried out a series of experiments during which they had volunteers shake hands with a person they had just met, they found that the majority of people tend to smell their own palms shortly after shaking hands with somebody.
More precisely, the specialists say that the volunteers involved in this research project smelled their own palms twice as often and as long after being greeted with a handshake by an experimenter.
The scientists theorize that this happened because, by sniffing their palms, the volunteers were looking to learn more about the person they had just shook hands with via chemical signals transferred onto their own body during the greeting.
“Our findings suggest that at its evolutionary origins, handshaking might have served to convey odor signals, and such signaling may still be a meaningful, albeit subliminal, component of this custom,” says researcher Noam Sobel.
