When people use hand gestures that visually represent what they're saying, listeners see them as more clear, competent and persuasive. That's the key finding from my new research published in the Journal of Marketing Research, where I analyzed thousands of TED Talks and ran controlled experiments to examine how gestures shape communication. I grew up in Italy, where gesturing is practically a second language. Now that I live in the United States, I've become acutely aware of how cultures differ in how, and how much, people move their hands when they talk. Still, across contexts and cultures, one thing is constant: People do talk with their hands. To study gestures at scale, my team and I analyzed 200,000 video segments from more than 2,000 TED Talks using AI tools that can detect and classify hand gestures frame by frame. We paired this with controlled experiments in which our study participants evaluated entrepreneurs pitching a product. The same pattern of results appeared in both...
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