RESEARCH NOTES #1: Not just a token gesture

"What should I do with my hands?" is a question we hear every week. So our researcher dug deep into academic papers to cast some light on the topic.

There’s an old joke that says if you want an Italian to stop talking, make them sit on their hands. It’s taken me the best part of four decades to become a fluent speaker – but if I lock down my hands, that fluency evaporates. My grandfather was Italian. Just sayin’.

As a comms advisor, the ‘hands’ issue comes up a lot. Sometimes I meet leaders who have been told by previous coaches or trainers to ‘stop using your hands’, and it completely baffles me. While nobody wants speakers windmilling their hands around wildly (unless, perhaps, when describing windmills), your hands are not just there for emphasis or as a secondary support to what you say. They are, in fact – along with other non-verbal signals – an unbreakable double act with your vocal expression.

But how? What does gesture actually do for us – and the audiences we are trying to engage? Well, we did the research, so you don’t have to. Here are four ideas that will help you re-think the use of gesture in your communications.

1: Gesture is an expression of your thinking; and it reduces ambiguity

David McNeill, University of Chicago professor emeritus in psychology, is one of the key researchers, and authors, in establishing relationships between gestures and speech. His book Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought [1] remains his most widely read piece of research, and provides a robust basis on theories of gesture and language.

McNeill based the research on a range of empirical studies in his lab. Participants from a range of cultural backgrounds watched videos of people explaining concepts/stories with, and without, using gesture. He later got the ‘watchers’ to retell the story. Those who watched the video with gestures had better comprehension, recall, and understanding of the content.

“Gestures and speech are part of the same psychological structure and reflect a unified underlying process and thought,” he writes. This affirms the psychological link that gestures are not just something we do to feel more comfortable when we are in our groove of communication. In fact, they are deeply intertwined with how we form and express ideas as gestures are part of the thought process. In particular, gesture helps us transfer images we may have in our minds externally - to the audiences with which we engage.

This means gestures improve cognitive and communication clarity. “Gestures convey meaning directly and can highlight or complement the speech, particularly in instances of complex or abstract ideas”.

What he means is, this helps audiences engage and understand topics more clearly where speech alone may leave the topic unclear. This links to his theory of Imagery-Language, suggesting that gestures delivered along with speech increase listener comprehension: “Listeners who see a speaker’s gestures have a deeper understanding of the speaker's message compared to when gestures are absent”.

There’s an excellent example of this in another McNeill book, Why we Gesture[2]. McNeill has study participants watch a Tweety Pie cartoon, and retell the story. At one point in the retelling, talking about a shock reveal involving Sylvester’s nemesis, Granny (I hope everyone is following the cultural references here), the participant says: “And he’s like…”. That’s all he says. But what he DOES is this: “hands start palm down and rock up in quick motion”. The gesture is showing what happened (Sylvester in shock), prefaced by the vocal context. Neither makes sense without the other.

Takeaway: If you don’t use gesture as part of the communication, you’re relying much more on the power of content and your verbal expression to engage and make memorable what you say.

2: Complex ideas need hands

Susan Meadow, from McNeill’s former lab at the University of Chicago and Martha Wagner Alibali at the University of Wisconsin wrote a paper in 2013[3] that infers gesture is a way of organising your thinking – especially when it comes to complex ideas or content.

Speakers that “produce gestures helps speakers organise and package visuo-spatial information into units that are compatible with the sequential format of speech”. In less dense academic English, this means speakers use gestures to not only aid the production of speech but to also break down complex information into manageable parts for verbalisation. An example in the paper is of describing objects arranged in a space – and using hands to indicate the positions of a couch and a chair while describing their arrangement in a room.

Gestures also aid word retrieval. Their studies show that when word access is harder or when talking about more complex subjects, speakers use more gestures. The flipside is that when gestures are prohibited, speakers are more dysfluent, bringing in more hesitation and pause.

An example cited for them was a circular hand gesture made before saying, "The ball rolled" primes the concept and word "roll", making it easier to access for the brain.

But it goes deeper. Speaking activates a triggering in the pre-motor areas of the brain which when exceeds a certain threshold causes a gesture. The social, individual and contextual factor are what contributes to whether this threshold is met. If motor activation is high enough then speaker will gesture.

What does it mean for us as communicators?

A little like McNeill’s findings, it means gestures can visually represent abstract information, making a clearer message and improved engagement though more dynamic communication. It increases your word access, which might be especially important for people not using their native language. Furthermore, gestures can make abstract or complex information more concrete, again supporting better recall and comprehension.

Takeaway: We’d always encourage speakers to make their content simpler – but if it remains complex, or you don’t have the time to work on easier cognition, your gestures are going to help you and your audience.

3: Manage your cognitive load

In media coaching sessions, I often notice that people doing simulated interviews slow down, avoid eye contact, become monotone, and shut down all gesture when they are figuratively wading through material they find difficult.

Sotaro Kita at the University of Warwick is highly influential in the field of gesture and communication, and a pioneer in work on linking cognitive and language functions. More than most, he has contributed significantly to understanding speech and gesture as part of a unified comms system.

In a 2017 paper for the American Psychology Association[4] he addressed the issues with cognitive load, and effective expression. Core to his findings is that gestures don't just communicate; they also have their own self-orientated cognitive functions. “People gesture more when describing difficult visual tasks or when cognitive load is higher, supporting the idea that gesture aids in problem-solving and memory retention."

Kita’s work further supports other academic findings. “Producing gestures encourages people to rely more on spatio-motoric representations (simply, ‘moving your hands in the air’). It facilitates how complex information is broken down and conveyed”, meaning gestures help people conceptualise information, allowing the speaker to activate, manipulate and package data or other complex content more effectively.

What this means for speakers is that gesture fixes a ‘picture’ of organisation of complex ideas or material – initiated by the speaker themselves, and received and deployed by the audience.

Takeaway: You can ‘act’ the content as well as describe it. As an example, as well as using structural devices in your content, like ‘there are three buckets of data we looked at…’, gesture will help audiences visualise and remember the metaphoric nature of the construct – such as you ‘putting’ categories of data physically into the buckets.

4: It’s you, not them

Two papers published by researchers at the Macquarie University psychology department show up interesting aspects about who benefits from gesture accompanying speech. One paper[5] suggests that comprehension may not be significantly improved, across all audiences, by the accompanying use of gesture. In other words, it’s not some silver bullet.

“…tests revealed that gestures significantly benefitted comprehension under a variety of circumstances, dependent on the type of gesture used, the information provided by gesture, the function of the gesture, the age of the learner, and the way comprehension was measured.”

In the second paper[6], researcher Kavya Dakore notes that in a study where some people were told to use gesture, and others instructed not to, there was an issue with the study participants who were not ‘natural’ gesturers who were told to use their hands – it proved an impediment to their recall of the material they read aloud.

For communicators the importance of both these studies is that you need to find what works for you, and your audience. We are sure there is a study somewhere that tells us how many people, out of 100, simply don’t need to use their hands to communicate effectively; when I come across one of these people, I often suggest that they may get more audience engagement if they are able to free up their hands.

On the flip side, your audience (or part of it) may not need you to use all the gestural bells-and-whistles to deliver less dense information – but, indeed, it may help YOU if you are able to use appropriate gesture to manage through your content (and cognitive load).

Conclusion

We can draw a few conclusions from these different perspectives. Broadly, using hand gestures during communication not only aids in conveying meaning but also plays an active role in the cognitive formulation of messages. So, it’s supporting both the speaker and the listener in more effective communication.

When I’m coaching someone, I often see something interesting happen. As I refer to above in item 3, people often wade through material they find complex, or dull, or uninspiring, or that which they must communicate but don’t want to, with low engagement. But then they might tell a story – or get onto some content they ‘like’ (and therefore find easy) and it’s like they’ve been plugged in. Hands come into play; variation in tone is amplified; speed varies; they smile, use eye contact and facial expression. The cognitive load may be high, but so is the confidence of success.

Looking through this research, one thing comes across loud and clear: it’s with the complex, difficult, or perhaps involuntary material that gesture will help you. It will help in your word recall, your packaging of complex materials, your articulation of image or spatial relationships. And all of that might well help your audience. After all, it’s what an Italian would do.

Guarente + Company Ltd. works with leaders to improve their communications preparation and outcomes. Please email Matt Guarente to get in touch.

[1] David McNeill (1995) Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. University of Chicago Press

[2] David McNeill. 2015, Why we Gesture. Cambridge University Press

[3] Susan Meadow and Martha Wagner Alibali. 2013. Gesture’s Role in Speaking, Learning and Creating Language. Annual Review of Psychology.

[4] Sotaro Kita et al., 2017. How Do gestures Influence Thinking and Speaking? The Gesture-for-Conceptualization Hypothesis. Psychology Review, APA.

[5] Sweller, et al: When Our Hands Help Us Understand: A Meta-Analysis Into the Effects of Gesture on Comprehension. June 2019. Psychological Bulletin 145(8)

[6] Thakore et al., 2024. From hand to minds: how gesture, emotional valence and individual difference impact narrative recall. Springer, Educational Psychology Review, 36.111