Lessons learned: Illustrating your point with your hands boosts persuasion
You’re reading Lessons Learned, which distills practical takeaways from standout campaigns and peer-reviewed research in health and science communication. Want more Lessons Learned? Subscribe to our Call to Action newsletter.
When you are practicing for a presentation, or shooting a video, how often do you plan out the way you will move your body? Speaking for myself, I never have a clue what I’m supposed to do with my hands. So what does the science have for me and my fellow awkward-handed communicators?
A new study published in The Journal of Marketing Research conducted a series of experiments to determine how different types of gestures affect understandability, perceived competence, persuasion, and likeability. The gestures they were interested in included:
- Illustrators: Visually represent the words you are saying. For example, making a small circle with your thumb and index finger while saying “the blood clot was about the size of a quarter.”
- Highlighters: Draw attention to something you are saying. For example, pointing at the ocean while saying “bodies of water.”
- Random/unrelated movement: Movement disconnected from anything you are saying. For example, adjusting your glasses, scratching an itch, or touching your hair.
What they learned: TED Talks where speakers illustrated their point with their hands received more likes, even after controlling for 30+ variables including aspects about the speaker (e.g. gender, skin tone), what they said (e.g. topics), and how they said it (e.g. speaking rate), as well as aspects of the video (e.g. video length and saturation/clarity). The second experiment explained this effect by showing that boosts to persuasion were due to improved understandability, which raised perceptions of the speaker’s competence, and, in turn, boosted persuasion. Highlighter movements and random movements did not have the same positive impacts.
Why it matters: Communication feedback often disproportionately focuses on the verbal and written aspects of communication. Evidence-based tips like this can help communicators improve their non-verbal communication skills.
➡️ Idea worth stealing: Use your hands to illustrate your points. For example, while saying something like “it boosts your immunity” you could gesture upwards to visually represent the rise.
What to watch: How evidence-based tips like this make their way into trainings, presentations, and social media content.
– Elissa Scherer
