Hand Gestures in Communication: Benefits for the audience and user
Should we be using hand gestures to communicate?
Yes, absolutely you should! There are several benefits to using hand gestures when you communicate for your audience as well as for yourself.
Absurdly, media training often teaches presenters to abstain from using hand gestures. Instead, they are trained to hold an odd, staged pose where hands are held together, forming a V-shape; fingers from one hand hold fingers from the other hand, sometimes concealing a clicker. Not only is this a blocking behaviour, creating a physical and, therefore, a psychological barrier between the speaker and the audience, but it also eliminates the second layer of communication that makes understanding easier for the audience. Furthermore, communication is more difficult for the speaker because, strangely, cognitive load lightens when using hand gestures—we’ll get to that soon.
Are hand gestures distracting?
Hand gestures can be distracting when used in the wrong way. If you use too many hand gestures, with fast movements taking up too much space, then yes, that can be distracting. Using hand gestures like that can make you appear scatty and disorganised. The audience (one or more people) can end up watching your hands and not listening to your words, or worse still, think you are crazy.
When we experience intense emotion such as fear or anger, our movements and gestures can speed up and increase in size, creating a dramatic show of emotion. I experienced intense creeped-out fear when confined in the tiny walled garden of my terraced house back home in England. A creature that I can only describe as a queen bee, the size of my hand, entered my garden and buzzed around for a few seconds that felt like an eternity. In disbelief that a bug so giant existed in the UK, and in absolute horror that it may land on me, my feet froze, and my arms flailed manically beside my ducked head—or so the witnesses of my emotional display told me.
When hand gestures inadvertently emulate movements displayed during high emotion, you risk being misunderstood, and your message may end up with meaning added where it wasn’t intended. On the other hand, when spontaneous hand gestures follow in rhythm with speech (co-speech gestures), communication improves.
Benefits of Hand Gestures for the Audience
Hand Gestures are Engaging
When co-speech gestures are used, the audience is more engaged because there is something to see as well as to hear. When describing why behaviours are important, I find it helpful to describe behavioural extremes. At the extreme end of behaviours that disengage, we’d be looking at little or no movement in the body, an expressionless face and a monotone voice. Adding natural flowing hand gestures increase engagement levels, making you more interesting to listen to.
Faster Interpretation of the Message
Natural flowing hand gestures also help the audience interpret the message effectively and efficiently because more areas of the brain are activated at the same time—they hear the message and see the message as it is communicated on two levels. This means faster processing of the message internally.
Purposeful Hand Gestures
Purposeful hand gestures add meaning as they describe words. For example, imagine someone gesturing that something is growing, reducing, tall or short; I don’t need to describe how this may look as it’s easy to visualise. These gestures back up what is heard in speech, again speeding up interpretation. The message is further cemented and is, therefore, more likely to be remembered. The result; the audience gets it!
Hand gestures that aren’t purposeful, those that flow along with speech, are called beats. Beats help the audience know where you’re up to in the conversation. Blinking can serve a similar purpose. When hands stop, the conversation has stopped, often signalling it’s time for the next person to take their conversational turn.
These beat-like movements can also be helpful to indicate differences in information, for example, making several points. If you’re describing two different points or concepts, hands can gesture to the left for the first point and to the right for the second point, or vice versa, visually establishing a difference and helping the audience understand.
Benefits of Hand Gestures for the User
This is where it gets interesting. Researchers have discovered that speech and hand gestures are closely connected as they share the same neural pathways.
Hand Gestures help us Remember
Free recall is a means of measuring the vitality of attention and memory. In free recall, items of information (for example, list items, numbers or words) are presented, and the subject is asked to recall them. Studies investigating hand gestures and memory recall have found that speakers using hand gestures have better free recall than those who don’t use hand gestures. While there isn’t clear evidence on the mechanisms behind this, somehow, using hand gestures to talk frees up the cognitive load.
Hand Gestures make Talking Easier
Lexical retrieval, the process of getting from a concept in your head to spoken words, also improves when you talk with your hands. This could be related to the freeing up of cognitive load, allowing more cognitive space to think clearly. When your mind is clearer, you can process more effectively. That’s why stress and emotion cloud thinking, and why meditation helps.
It could also be due to the close connection between hand gestures and verbal communication, the shared neural pathways. Perhaps hand gestures provide more oomph in those pathways, aiding lexical retrieval. Side note, I’m giggling about using words like ‘oomph’ while talking about academic research.
When children attempt to describe something with their hands that they can’t yet verbally explain, we know they are on the cusp of grasping the concept and soon will be able to explain it verbally. Furthermore, children who produce more hand gestures early on have larger expressive vocabularies later in development.
Hand Gestures Prevent Blocking Behaviours
If you’re talking with your hands, you’re avoiding blocking behaviours; your hands move as you talk instead of touching one another, maintaining an open stance. Open body language means there are no physical, and therefore psychological, barriers making you appear more open, approachable and trustworthy. In other words, people like you more.
Purposeful hand gestures add meaning to conversation.
Beat-like gestures help people follow and understand the conversation.
Try Using Hand Gestures
If you don’t already use hand gestures to talk, you’re missing out on the benefits. There’s strong evidence that hand gestures are universal because chimps and Bonobos, our closest relatives, use them, meaning our last common ancestor used them. Human babies communicate with hand gestures too, preceding speech, and blind people use hand gestures, even when communicating to a blind audience.
So why don’t we all use hand gestures, and why do some people use them more than others? It’s important to realise there are cultural differences in how people use hand gestures, with some cultures using them more than others. We may unlearn hand gestures if we are raised in a culture or family that doesn’t use them, fitting in with social norms.
I’ve found in myself and with clients that making a deliberate effort to use hand gestures unlocks the ability to use them naturally. It doesn’t take long before your hands are flowing naturally alongside speech to the point where you don’t need to think about them. This is where I want you to be–try it.
