Will virus kill handshake for good?
ELBOW BUMPS AND FOOT TAPS ARE IN, BUT LIKELY WON’T LAST
Last night after a dinner party, as a friend took his leave, he parted with an unusual flourish: a gracious bow. Another left with a delicate round of fist bumps, and still another with an exaggerated wave. What nobody wanted to do was shake hands. As the number of cases of COVID-19 continues to rise across Canada and the rest of the world, so too does fear of infection, and in an effort to stem the current of the pandemic’s advance, we may be finding ourselves taking certain precautionary measures. Anxious to avoid germs, and reluctant to trust the health of friends and strangers, we’re all intent to create and maintain a reasonable degree of social distance. Our rituals have had to change to accommodate the reality of coronavirus. The handshake is the first thing to go.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States issued a statement earlier this month in which they expressly advised people against “touching high-touch surfaces in public places,” including elevator buttons, door handles, handrails, and especially other people’s hands. Consequently, state officials, professional athletes, and all manner of public figures have been abstaining from the handshake, instead substituting the traditional ritual for other gestures of greeting. Vice-president Mike Pence, who was assigned by Donald Trump to lead the country’s response to the pandemic, emerged as an early proponent of the elbow bump, which quickly gained purchase worldwide as a favoured alternative. Others have advocated the foot tap, which involves even less bodily contact.
Of course, adjusting to these new forms of address has been difficult — not least because the prevailing replacements look pretty bizarre. The foot tap and the elbow bump have a way of feeling vaguely ridiculous, and even as awareness of disease prevention efforts makes the gestures understandable, it’s hard to take them entirely seriously, especially in business settings. The handshake may be equally absurd, and in a modern context the distinction is somewhat arbitrary, but centuries of tradition have normalized it in our culture, and it may be too deeply rooted in Western custom to be discarded. We don’t need to shake hands to show our enemies that we’re unarmed, as the Ancient Greeks did as far back as the 5th century BC — the ritual has long since transcended its original purpose. But the ritual remains, ingrained and, coronavirus be damned, almost certainly unshakable.
There are several compelling reasons to celebrate the temporary suspension of the handshake. The handshake has been exploited as an opportunity to flex one’s strength and flaunt one’s power; it can have an arrogant, bullying quality, or a condescending undertone, or even the whisper of a threat. The handshakes exchanged by athletes at the end of sporting events are almost always fraught with tension or animosity, while the handshakes dispensed widely by politicians on the campaign trail seem unctuous and wheedling, transparently contrived to make them seem approachable. Handshakes are the language of door-to-door salesmen and executives of dubious morality, the currency of alliances manufactured and deals slickly sealed.
But the handshake is also a rare gesture of casual intimacy, and one that has an appreciable, proven effect. In 1996, a sales manager in Chicago named Allen Konopacki developed an experiment to test the impact of the handshake on strangers. He left a quarter in a public phone booth, and after strangers
THE FOOT TAP AND THE ELBOW BUMP HAVE A WAY OF FEELING VAGUELY RIDICULOUS.
used the phone, he approached them and asked if they had seen a missing quarter. More than half lied and said they hadn’t. When Konopacki tried the experiment again, he introduced himself to the strangers with a handshake before asking them about the quarter. This time, more than 80 per cent told the truth. “A handshake,” Konopacki later told The New York Times, “creates a higher level of trust, a degree of intimacy, within a matter of seconds.”
The handshake is an occasion to reach out and touch one another, to enjoy a tiny, fleeting connection. So much of our communication now is mediated by a screen that the pulse of real human contact feels all the more precious — and meeting someone face to face, whether a client or a colleague or a friend, always suggests a closer level of familiarity than merely touching base online.
In the early 1990s, Northwest Airlines coined a slogan that expressed the idea succinctly: “You can’t fax a handshake.” As the coronavirus spreads and habits change, it may prove that you can’t fist bump or foot tap a handshake either. There’s something in human nature that responds to the handshake. It feels good to shake the hand of someone you respect or admire, to have that moment of bonding. It feels indelible; in a sense it can’t be seriously replaced. We don’t want to be spreading infectious diseases around unnecessarily, obviously. But when COVID-19 is a distant memory, chances seem good that the handshake will prevail again.