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One simple trick can make you seem more persuasive when you're talking to people. This is the discovery of University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers, who have revealed that while words are important, talking with your hands could hold more power. In fact, “purposeful” hand gestures—and one type in particular—can make you appear both more convincing and competent. Building on previous research exploring speech patterns and facial expressions, this is the “first” study to examine hand gestures at scale, according to the team. Audiences can interpret illustrative gestures as a sign of mastery, explains paper author and information systems researcher professor Mi Zhou. “If a person uses their hands to visually illustrate what they’re talking about, the audience perceives that this person has more knowledge and can make things easier to understand,” Zhou said in a statement. “Might moving one’s hands while speaking increase persuasion? And if so, what types of movements are more impactful, and why?”—these were the questions that the researchers set out to answer. Accordingly, in their study, team researchers used AI and automated video analysis on 2,184 TED Talks. This allowed them to isolate more than 200,000 hand gestures into 10-second-long clips and compare them against audience engagement metrics—such as, for example, ‘likes’ on social media—while controlling for factors like gender, occupation, language, video length and more. In a second line of analysis, the team also recruited participants to watch videos of sales pitches in which speakers delivered identical scripts but varied their hand movements. The volunteers were then asked to rate each speaker and the products they had pitched. While more hand movement was associated with increased presentation impact, the type of gesture used was also found to make a difference. Categories of gesture included “illustrators” that visually depict spoken content, such demonstrating the size of something while describing it; and “highlighters,” for example pointing to an object mentioned. Random, unrelated movements and the absence of gestures were also examined. Illustrator gestures came out on top, making speakers seem more knowledgeable and improving audience understanding, according to the researchers. However, highlighters and random gestures showed little to no impact. “Illustrators can help make the content easier to understand because we’re delivering the same information in two modes: visual and verbal,” said study author Mi Zhou, UBC Sauder School of Business professor. “When people use illustrators, it increases viewers’ perception of the speaker’s competence.” Advances in AI helped the researchers come to their conclusions. They used 21 key points on the hands to calculate hand movement in videos, classified gesture types and then linked them to spoken content using multimodal AI: “a type of artificial intelligence that can simultaneously analyze multiple types of data.” “One of the key takeaways for marketers [or anyone trying to persuade an audience] is that you can use the same content but if you pay more attention to how that content is delivered, it could have a big impact on persuasiveness,” explained Zhou. “Sometimes we just move our hands without a purpose. It’s a habit,” she added. “But if you pay more attention and understand the impact, it can make a big difference.” Newsweek has reached out to the researchers for additional comment. Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about body language? Let us know via science@newsweek.com. Reference
