The Power Is In Your Hands (Literally)
How Our Hands Affect Cognition, Business, and More.
Take a look down at your hands. I’m sure you can already appreciate their dexterity, but today I want you to really understand the gravity of what lies before you. Chimpanzee arms and legs are more than twice as strong as humans’, despite the fact they don’t use their legs for daily locomotion like we do. But our fine motor control is the envy of our primate cousins, for many reasons. Today, we’re honing in on one: Speech and Nonverbal Gestures.
The Science of Speech
We use our hands to communicate a surprising amount of information, not just through sign language, but in conjunction with verbal communication. In fact, this pairing may have been a critical juncture in human cognitive evolution. Long before humans gained the ability to speak, being bipedal freed up our hands, enabling us to use gestures to convey meaning. Various ape species, infants, and deaf children all have been observed to independently create sign languages that others understand before they’re capable of vocal range. But humans diverge from the pack in the coordination of the two.
When researchers tested the ability of macaques to react physically in time with a video stimulus, they picked it up pretty quickly, but when it came time to vocalize in time with it, they struggled, even though the stimulus remained unaltered. Why? Their physical and vocal cortices follow separate systems, unlike the close ties present in Broca’s area of the human brain. As it turns out, human babies and monkeys are very similar, until you dive into the difference between crying and cooing (also known as babbling). All babies cry, to express their discomfort, hunger, pain and other common feelings, and this crying is tightly linked with their emotional state. But, as human babies mature, they start to make vocally distinct sounds separate from their emotions, cooing or babbling to their parents, and scientists believe this ultimately serves as the foundation of language in the brain. Other primates’ noises - while capable of complexity, extreme volume and whispering - are essentially just advanced crying.
Okay, cognitive science lecture over. Now, how does this relate to whether or not you’re going to trust a seller?
Break out the Finger Guns
In Shakespearean times, fingernails were referred to as “commandments”, as seen here in Henry IV:
“Could I come near your beauty with my nails, I could set my ten commandments on your face.”
Get it? Because there are ten of them? Snark aside, your hands actually can be highly functional tools in getting people to follow your commands.
According to a detailed study investigating the physical gestures that lead to charisma in salespeople, symmetric arm and hand movements were a huge component, especially when paired with varied speech and eye contact. This is because symmetric movements are far easier for the brain to process, and salespeople had more positive sales outcomes, higher charisma ratings, and greater customer satisfaction, simply based on their hand movements.
As you’ll see in the chart above, culture did have a mediating impact on these findings. Most countries are low to moderate gesture, including the US, but in high gesture cultures like Israel, people tended to gesture asymmetrically, with one arm, and asymmetric gestures indicated charisma. But the key tenet remained — as long as your gestures sync with your words, people respond favorably.
Don’t be afraid to put those ten commandments into play either. Research conducted in the aptly titled study “Trust During Retail Encounters: A Touchy Proposition” showed that a physical touch from a salesperson increases customer trust, which, in turn, increases product evaluation perceptions and intention to purchase products. Other research agrees with this finding, and it holds true for leadership as well. The more your gesticulation gels with your subordinates, the more positively you’ll be regarded. There is one caveat: Suspicious people will question your motives more strongly the more vigorously you gesticulate, so no need to go inflatable tube man on them.
Let’s say you’re making your pitch via webcam instead. Do your non-verbals still matter? Yep. Studies show that when online, you still woo your audience with your hands, but the pace of your speech is also a significant factor. Faster talking shows listeners that you’re more at ease, while making frequent, lengthier gazes boosts affinity. That being said, you don’t stare have to stare them down. Gazing was defined in this experiment as a measure of looking at someone while speaking, which could be their face or general upper body, a process distinct from making direct eye contact.
Ease The Pain
Non-verbal signals can help out with pain too! Research was conducted where patients had their blood drawn and performed physically tiring hand exercises while a doctor either sent warm signals (head nodding, eye contact, leaning forward) or was neutral or distant. The results showed that patients undergoing these exercises tolerated pain for a significantly longer period of time and rated their levels of pain as lower, even accounting for individual differences in pain sensitivity.
Happy gesticulating! And don’t be self-conscious! (Research shows that we estimate our hands to be far shorter and stubbier than they actually are.)
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Fun Facts:
Hannibal Brooks is an Insight Associate at Olson Zaltman.
