Hey everybody, it's time for quick questions. As if I needed to announce it was time for
quick questions because obviously if you've started this video, it's time.
I got a number questions about hands and specifically, left hands and I wanted to answer them because
I'm left-handed. But apparently the reaction of a lot of people around the world to that
news is.
As Alexius Nemo asked, 'What's up with the bias in Western cultures against left handed
people?' In 2013 Smithsonian Magazine published an article with the headline 'Two-Thirds of
the World Still Hates Lefties'. Which made me a little nervous about my international
travel plans and made me wonder whether I should start training this guy. This is my
right-handed thumbs up. It's true though that mistrust of left-handers goes back in some
parts of the world thousands of years and exists even today in places like China, India
and some Islamic countries according to research. Now the simplest explanation for our discomfort
sometimes with left-handedness is the fact that it deviates from the norm. Ninety percent
of people are born right-handed, look I was about to raise my left-hand. That's just how
left-handed I am. Due to the rarity of left-handedness, some religions and cultures began to associate
left-handedness with being dirty or unclean or out-of-the-ordinary or even being associated
with the devil. In a number of Muslim countries in fact as well as parts of Africa and India
offering a left handshake would be considered offensive. Even in the United States, left-handedness
only recently became more okay. If you look back at medical journals from only say fifty
to eighty years ago, there were some neurologists and psychoanalysts who thought that children
should be taught right-handedness, even if it meant restraining their left-hands say
behind their backs and forcing them as children to write with their right hands. So to answer
Alexius Nemo's question, anti-lefty bias exists because well, we're weirdos. Eric Johnson
also had a question about left-handed ladies like myself. Hello. 'At least from what I've
seen why are more women left handed than men?' It turns out in fact that a meta-analysis
of 144 studies on handedness found that more men tend to be left-handed compared to women.
Why this is is a giant question mark. Scientists are still trying to figure out why this whole
handedness think exists to begin with. A lot of animals including doggies favor one paw
over the other, one side over the other. That kind of handedness as it were, is usually
split fifty-fifty so humans are really weird in the fact that we have this ninety-ten split
of right-handers to left-handers. Finally Sarah Metcalf had a question about handshakes
which definitely ties to handedness, particularly if you are in part of the world where you
should not shake with your left hand. 'In my experience more often than not it has proven
to be true that a person's first impression handshake reveals the quality of their character.
To my knowledge there haven't been any studies firmly, that's sort of a handshake pun, linking
the quality of one's handshake to their overall character because I think that would be an
impossible relationship to firmly establish. I just said firmly again. But there have been
studies on our perception of people's handshakes. Studies confirm that oh yeah we absolutely
judge people based on their handshakes because we even have that difference between a 'good
handshake' and a 'bad handshake'. Everyone pretty much agrees on what a good handshake
is. It's firm but not too firm, it's confident, it's not too long, usually it does not involve
a lot of palm sweat which sometimes is a little bit of a problem for yours truly. In the same
way that we read each other's body language in general, our handshakes also communicate
things like confidence and self-assurance or on the flip side of that, nervousness or
awkwardness or maybe even overcompensation for the people who really shake a little too
hard. Before I head out, I got a quick question for you: Leaving the toilet seat up, disgusting
or what's the big deal? If you got quick or long questions for me you can comment below,
message or tweet me @cristenconger and be sure to like and subscribe so you don't miss
a single thing that mom never told you. Should have said 'stuff', the name of your channel
Cristen is 'Stuff Mom Never Told You'. Not things mom never told you. Stuff. Stuff. Next
time.