We Read Your Hands. Seriously.
Beatrice Lessi
What Can Your Fingers Tell, According To Science?
If you are interested in someone romantically or would like to hire them, how about interviewing them to find out about their personality? Or you can also add some very interesting information recently proven by science: ask them to send photocopies of their hands!
Sounds strange?
The science of hand reading is moving fast. Checking your fingers’ ratio might soon be a routine part of job or partner selection procedures.
The Longer Your Ring Finger, The More Masculine.
What researchers are particularly interested in is the ratio between the length of your index finger versus your ring finger, the 2D:4D ratio. This ratio is a record of how much you were exposed as a developing foetus in your mother’s womb, to androgens such as testosterone, the male sex hormone. In other words, this digit ratio gives an indication of how masculinised both your body and your brains are. The lower the ratio — thus the longer your ring finger compared to the pointer—the more masculine you supposedly are.
You might want to try this at home but be warned. It is not easy to estimate this with the naked eye and researchers therefore use a scanner to scan the hands and calculate the ratio precisely.
Sexual Orientation
So what does this ratio reveal about your sexuality and personality? Men have a relatively longer ring finger (compared to the pointer) than women. Another very consistent finding is that it reveals something about your sexual orientation. Gay women have relatively low (more masculine) ratios compared to straight women. Gay men have a relatively high (more feminine) ratio. This suggests that sexual orientation is determined well before one’s birth.
How Dominating Are You?
In a recent study in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Dutch and Spanish scientists find that among men a lower 2D:4D ratio is related to a more aggressive, dominating personality. They first scanned the left and right hands of the male participants and then averaged the 2D:4D’s of both hands (hands are not identical). They then completed an aggressive dominance scale with items such as “When people are annoying me, I put them in their place” and “I quickly feel aggressive with people.” The more masculine 2D:4D’s scored higher on this scale.
More Femine Means What?
A more complex finding on digit ratios was published recently in the prestigious Journal of Nature. A research team in the Netherlands conducted a study about the effects of administering testosterone (by mouth) on social cooperation. There was no straightforward effect of testosterone on social cooperation.Yet the effect is moderated by digit ratios. Only the more feminine digit ratios responded to testosterone by cooperating more with other people.
This shows that a boost in testosterone might not always produce more dominant or aggressive behavior. In fact, it will have the opposite effect for people with a higher (more feminine) digit ratio who become more friendly. As usual, female are complex!
This article is based on What Do Your Fingers Tell by Psychology Today
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