want to put the focus on all of you for
a few moments so I’d like everyone to
stand up so just ignore the previous
warning and I want everyone to face a
person next to you so make sure everyone
and now I want everyone in your own way
to give the person you’re facing are
okay very good you my you may sit down
again so I saw a few kind of awkward
greeting moments in the audience and
that’s what I’m talking about today so
my earliest kind of memory of a really
awkward greasing was when I was around
16 years old and I was on a family
holiday in Norway and I remember being
introduced to these guys they were in
their 20s and like I was used to in
Norway I put out my hand to greet them
and they just looked at me no no no
that’s not how we greet in Portugal and
one after the other they approached me
and embrace me with two or three kisses
on the cheeks and I was so embarrassed I
felt that they had completely intruded
on my personal space and this is a
memory I really I’ll never forget how I
felt in that moment so this is what my
research is about and um as the SEC said
I’m em my background is Norwegian and
Irish so I’ve always been interested in
cultural related communication and also
how I was interpreted in Norway and
which was quite different and how people
experience me in Ireland whereas my
behavior didn’t necessarily change so
since the greeting in Portugal and I’ve
traveled a lot and lived in different
cultures and countries and I’ve noticed
that my own greeting habits have also
changed quite a lot so actually nowadays
I’m often the one that creates this
awkward situation where I’m like hugging
someone and then I realized mid-air that
this is really not appropriate so I kind
of make other people feel awkward in
these moments and there are other
moments as well you know in with
business meetings when you go to shake
the hand of the person and it’s like
it’s either too hard or too loose or
sometimes they squeeze your hands so
much that it hurts and then
oh yeah sometimes I go a bit too forward
and I touched their shoulder and I
realized and that wasn’t really
appropriate and then it’s the kissing
greasing so it’s like should I give one
two kisses is it three four or even five
and then it’s always the same question
do I go right or left first and recently
I had a really awkward nose crash with
the French friend of mine I was so
enthusiastic to greet him the French way
so I really went for it and then we just
banged our noses and it was really
painful and quite awkward so I was
interested to study this greetings
basically in a more in my PhD but also
in the area where i grew up in norway
and close to the city of stavanger so i
did a field work for my PhD study which
included six different cultures and
norwegian turkish Vietnamese and Golan
Somali and Chilean participants and I
wanted to have quite wide ranging
cultures from different parts of the
world but also that included different
religions because our religious
backgrounds also kind of influence our
behavior so what I found was the people
really enthusiastic to join the study
because they wanted to represent their
own culture from a firsthand perspective
which you don’t often get a chance to do
so they were very enthusiastic and here
are some of the stills from some of the
videos that I documented and this was
kind of the base the core work that I
used to create my visualizations so just
to show you a few examples of some
visualizations so here are three
greetings between a male and a female
and there are all strangers to each
other so on the left you have a greeting
between an a Norwegian male and then an
Angolan female and then in the middle
it’s two Norwegians and to the right two
Chilean people so I wanted to look at
gestures but also how in different
cultures we use the space between us
quite differently and then I was very
interested in how much touch is
appropriate in the greeting so you can
start to compare and then this overhead
view shows the use of personal space
which i think is really interesting and
using color coding you can start to kind
of compare in different situations but
also in different cultures what is kind
of the appropriate use of personal space
or people’s comfort levels so if you
look at the Norwegian Angolan greasing
and he was not it was actually a really
funny moment because it was kind of like
migrating in Portugal where she was
going in for the kiss and he wanted to
do a handshake and then you can see he’s
not completely in her zone so he’s
keeping a bit more distant where she’s
really going in for a lot of physical
contact so I was interested in how in
many cultures you perceive touch and
close proximity to another person as
warm friendly behavior but what also
became quite obvious and interesting was
that in many cultures there are other
ways to kind of display warm behavior so
this is an example from Vietnamese
squeezing where they said that in their
culture it’s very important to show
respect to elderly people so usually the
younger person boughs a bit further than
the older person to show respect and to
them this is very warm behavior so you
can see in contrast to the kiss
increasing they have a lot of personal
space and a lot of space between them
but it’s still a very warm breathing so
when we were discussing this with the
Vietnamese participants one of the
ladies said we do not use a lot of
physical contact when we greet but that
does not mean that we do not care about
each other smiling is very important not
hugging but eye contact and smiling
shows a lot of respect so the more I got
to know the people involved in my study
the more
are interested I got in how they
experience the greeting so the other
visualizations showed what’s happening
the space the touch but it doesn’t show
their experience of the greeting so I
started working with graphic patterns to
to start to visualize the subjective
experiences so if we go back to
migrating in Portugal for example you
can see that I I perceive the other
person as being intrusive they’re
intruding on myspace whereas they
perceive me as being distant so this it
became very obvious working with these
patterns and the greetings that in
different cultures it’s easy to see how
you can kind of clash across cultures
because of our different backgrounds but
then it was also quite interesting
because one of the one of the greetings
within the Turkish culture and they had
very different religious backgrounds and
they were from different regions in
Turkey so you can also find a lot of
cultural difference within the broader
national cultures so this one was
particularly interesting because the
male was from he was a non practicing
Muslim and the female was a quite
religious Muslim and so he said that he
usually greets his or of the other
females with either a handshake or three
kisses on the cheek where she prefers to
not great other men than her husband she
wouldn’t touch them then so there was a
similar situation in Switzerland
recently which was all over the media
where two teenage Syrian refugee boys
they refused to shake the hand of their
female teacher and this really kind of
went all over the media and it kind of
sparked this conversation about
integration about cultural difference
religious difference sexual equality so
it just shows that a greeting or a
simple handshake can carry so much
meaning it to different cultures and and
that it’s really important to be aware
that the other person
experience is the greeting quite
differently to you so working with these
participants and cultures I learned a
lot I learned that people are not either
warm or cold friendly or rude respectful
or disrespectful it’s just that we’ve
been patterned differently by our
cultural backgrounds and I think
sometimes if tension arises it’s good to
keep this in mind and so just consider
that they’ve been brought up differently
to you so maybe next time when you’re
traveling or if you’re in a business
meeting or maybe you made a refugee who
has come a long way from a very
different cultural background to you
just keep in mind that these are the
reasons why they’re greasing might be
different and this also extends to other
areas of life and other types of
behavior and interaction so i encourage
you to reflect on your greasing that you
did at the beginning of the talk and
maybe consider how you felt in that
moment and then how the other person
felt thank you [Applause]