by Sian Beilock
Approximately 29 million viewers tuned in to watch the debate that night. It was sure to be good television, and voters were keenly interested in hearing each candidate’s plan to revitalize the economy. McCain wasted no time bringing up “Joe the plumber,” evoking his name over a dozen times in the first half of the debate alone. Obama’s plan was “going to increase [Joe’s] taxes,” said McCain, gesturing pointedly with his right hand. Obama countered, emphasizing his view by beating his left hand on the table in front of him: “I want to provide a tax cut for 95 percent of working Americans, 95 percent.” Essentially Obama was saying that it was better to lower taxes for Americans who make less so they could afford to do more.3
Americans were highly attuned to what each candidate was proposing at this late stage in the game, but not everyone was simply listening to their speeches. The psychologist Daniel Casasanto was also observing their body language, especially their hands. People gesture with their hands all the time while speaking, often without realizing that they are doing it. Casasanto—at that time a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University—was doing research to try to better understand why we gesture while we speak. How do a speaker’s gestures help him effectively communicate a message to others? What exactly do these hand movements reveal? Casasanto had a hunch that hand gestures serve as a window into what a person is really thinking. Unlike the words we utter, our gestures tend to be more automatic, not under our conscious control. Casasanto thought that gestures might reveal what people were hesitant to put into words, and he was particularly interested in the specific hand that politicians gesture with when speaking about touchy topics like health care and tax reform.
Casasanto observed that, throughout history, there has been a tendency to associate the right side of things with “good” and the left side with “bad.” When people gesture with the right hand, this tends to indicate that they have a positive view of what they are saying; the opposite is true when they use their left hand. In ancient Rome, orators were warned never to gesture with only their left hand while giving a speech; in modern Ghana, pointing and gesturing with the left hand is taboo. According to Islamic law, the left hand should be used only for dirty jobs, like wiping oneself after using the toilet, whereas the right hand should be used for eating; likewise one should enter the bathroom left foot first and enter the mosque right foot first. As in English, the word for right in French (droit) and German (recht) denotes both the direction and, as a noun, a legal right or privilege. This is in contrast to gauche and links, the French and German words for left, which are associated with words meaning distasteful or clumsy. Perhaps the author of Ecclesiastes summed it up best in this adage: “The wise man’s heart is at his right hand, but the fool’s heart is at his left.”4
Why is right connected with good and left with bad? Casasanto believes that it comes from our experiences interacting in the world. Bodies are lopsided, not symmetrical, and most people have a dominant hand. Activities like signing our name or putting a key in a lock are more easily—more fluently—performed with our good hand. Interestingly, this fluency influences people’s evaluations of objects and other people: we like things better when they appear on our dominant side. When right-and left-handers were asked to judge which of two products to buy or which of two job applicants to hire based on brief descriptions found on either the left or the right side of a page, right-handers tended to choose the person or product described on the right, but left-handers chose the person or product on the left. We tend to favor the side that we find it easier to act in. In short, the content of our mind depends on the structure of our body, and different bodies lead to different ways of thinking.5
This means the story is a bit more complicated than right equals good and left equals bad. Casasanto believes that the linking of right with good (“my right-hand man”) and left with bad (“my two left feet”) likely developed because the right-handed majority prefers to interact with the world using their right hand (and the right side of their body more generally). Of course, this also means that for the minority left-handers in the world, these associations are reversed. In other words, even though the hand with which people gesture might tell us what they think about the message they are conveying, how we interpret their gesture depends on their preferred hand. Right-handers will tend to gesture about good things with their right hand and bad things with their left. The opposite is true for lefties.
As Casasanto watched the final 2008 presidential debate, he realized he had the makings of a perfect natural experiment. He could actually test whether or not the candidates were more likely to gesture about positive messages with their dominant hand. But there was one small problem: McCain and Obama are both left-handed. Casasanto was missing a right-handed candidate to serve as a comparison. Fortunately all he had to do was turn the clock back four years to a video of John Kerry and George W. Bush, who ran for the U.S. presidency in 2004. Both are right-handed.
Casasanto ran a simple test: he analyzed both the speech and the gestures of all the candidates in the final debates of the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections to see whether they were more likely to deliver positive messages when gesturing with their preferred hand and negative messages when gesturing with their nonpreferred hand. Casasanto and his research team combed through more than three thousand spoken sentences and almost two thousand gestures. The findings were clear. For Obama and McCain, left-hand gestures were associated more strongly with positive statements and right-hand gestures with negative ones. The opposite pattern emerged for Kerry and Bush.
Democrats are said to be on the left side of the political spectrum, and Republicans on the right. Yet Casasanto found that gestures related to good and bad sentiments depended on the handedness of the politician, not his politics. As McCain waxed poetic about Sarah Palin, he gestured with his dominant left hand, saying, “She has ignited our party and people all over America.” While Bush was talking about social security (“They will continue to get their checks”), he gestured with his right hand. The hand politicians use to gesture with seems to have unexpected communicative value, providing voters with a subtle index of how the speaker feels about what he is saying. Just look at what Obama said in 2008 about health insurance while he gestured with his left hand: “You can keep your health insurance.” Four years earlier Kerry made positive statements about the same subject using his right hand: “You wanna buy it, you can.”6
Casasanto opened wide a window into understanding people’s emotions: it’s not just about what people say but what they are doing with their hands. Gestures reveal a speaker’s feelings about what he is saying, even when he doesn’t put those thoughts into words.
Body language experts are utilized in all sorts of situations, including to prepare executives to interact more fluently with their business partners and by the FBI to help agents determine whether someone is telling the truth.7 Often these experts focus on facial expressions and eye movements as a way to ascertain whether or not someone is expressing his true thoughts and feelings. Now we know that we can also use the particulars of hand gesture to get inside someone’s head.
It turns out that right-handers agree more with messages delivered by speakers who are gesturing with their right hand; the reverse is true for left-handers. This means that knowing your audience, whether you are pitching to a right-or a left-handed client, is important. We agree more with speakers when they gesture with the hand we prefer to use, as if we were putting ourselves in the shoes of the gesturer.8 Even though it might seem like a small detail, every advantage counts in landing that all-important deal. If you want to maximize the chance that folks will agree with your talking points, gesture about them with the hand your listener prefers to use.
It is even the case that how smooth you are when moving your arms matters. Professional poker players spend hours perfecting their expressionless “poker face,” and not surprisingly, their facial expressions don’t give away the cards they hold in their hands. But their arm movement
s do. When moving chips to place bets, poker players’ actions betray the quality of their cards. Because we all tend to be smoother in our actions when we are more confident and less anxious, players judged to have smoother movements actually turned out to have better cards.9 Our arm movements can be quite revealing. Whether you gesture when you talk or how you push an offer across the table on a folded-up piece of paper, what you do with your body reflects what’s going on in your mind.
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We routinely use hand gestures and other forms of body language to communicate with one another. But we don’t gesture just to convey information to others; we also gesture for ourselves. We gesture while we are on the phone, even when the person we are talking to can’t see us. Moving our hands helps free up brainpower. When we gesture, some of what we are working on can virtually be held at our fingertips, freeing up our mind to hold other important pieces of information.
Our understanding of the relationship between gestures and thinking was greatly enhanced by two psychologists at the University of Chicago, David McNeill and Susan Goldin-Meadow, who conducted numerous experiments demonstrating the power of gesture for a person who is moving her hands while talking. Gestures help us think and, more important, think differently than we would if we spoke without moving. One interesting aspect of gesture, Goldin-Meadow says, is that the information conveyed with our hands is often not found anywhere in the speech that accompanies it. In this way, gesture seems to reflect thoughts that speakers may not even know they have. Among students who have difficulty solving equations such as 4 + 5 + 3 = __ + 3, performance improves markedly if they are taught gestures that mimic the problem solution: grouping together the unique left-side numbers with a two-fingered “V” (that is, the 4 and the 5), and then pointing their index finger at the blank space on the right. Most striking, students are more likely to solve these types of equivalence problems if they are taught to gesture about them using the two-fingered “V” than if they are simply told to say, “I need to make one side equal to the other.” Enacting the solution with their hands helps students to get a better handle (no pun intended) on the problem.10
It’s also the case that when students are just about to grasp a problem, such as the math problem above, they often show inconsistencies between what they say about the solution and what they do with their hands. A student might, for example, group the 4 and 5 together with a two-fingered “V” and slide it over to the blank side on the right (the correct answer) while at the same time saying, “You add up 4 + 5 + 3 to get the solution” (the wrong answer). They have the correct answer hidden somewhere, but just can’t seem to put it into words. When students don’t move their hands, when they only talk about how to solve the problem, there aren’t enough channels to convey what they know. Gesturing provides them with another avenue to express the correct answer. Having more opportunities to get the right answer—even if you don’t yet know you have it—makes students more likely to learn.
How does gesture change our mind? One idea is that gestures are really just an outgrowth of how we might mentally simulate performing activities. Gestures give life to our mental scratch pads, allowing us to perform actions with our hands before we have to do them in real life or before we have thought these activities all the way through to put them into words.11
In one experiment, children were asked to solve the mental rotation block problem in the figure. The children tended to gesture as though they were holding the two shapes in (a), first holding the shapes apart and then moving them together and rotating them. The gestures look just like the movements the shapes would make if they could be picked up and actually moved. The more a child moves her hands, the better she does at these space-based problems.12
Children were asked to mentally put together the two shapes in (a)
to determine which one of the shapes it matched in (b).
When people explain how they perform activities ranging from hitting a golf ball to successfully flipping a crepe, they gesture. They produce motions with their hands as if they were doing the action they are talking about. Encouraging people to perform the rotation movements with the shapes, mimic the trajectory of the golf ball, or even use the “V” to understand how one side of an equivalence problem is equal to the other leads to learning. This is because what comes out in gesture adds new information to our repertoire of thoughts—information that is often more easily expressed and remembered when it is conveyed with our hands. It’s also information we may not yet know we have in mind.13
Chemistry professors at the University of Maine have been on to the power of gesture for some time now. For the past several years, they have been encouraging students in introductory chemistry classes to gesture when they think about molecules.14 Because a molecule is three-dimensional, students tend to be better at understanding and remembering its structure when they use their hands to represent different parts of it. It’s hard to explain only in words something with a three-dimensional structure, but when we can use our hands to create a molecule in the space in front of us, we see it more clearly and remember it better.
Gestures help us learn. They also help us remember.15 So next time you are trying to memorize information for a test or a big presentation at work, try gesturing while you practice. Gesture allows you to capture subtleties of an issue that may be difficult to convey in speech; it also gives you another way to recall the information at a later point. Just as actors are better able to remember their lines when they link them to actions, gesturing and speaking provides us with two different versions of what we are trying to commit to memory. When it is time to remember, you have two hooks (one related to action and one to speech) with which to fish out the information.
It’s not just gestures. Our hand movements affect our thinking too. In this day and age, when so much of our communication is done virtually, the text messages, emails, and phone numbers we tap out serve as a primary means of conveying information. As it happens, our hand movements and the keyboard letters they are tied to have come to shape our vernacular. They even influence how we feel about the people and companies on the other end of the messages we send and the numbers we dial. How you use your body to communicate and how easily or fluently you do so shapes how you feel about all sorts of things, giving whole new meaning to the term body language.
Mind Control
This is the tale of the QWERTY keyboard. The name comes from the first six letters that appear in the top left row (read left to right) of the English-language typewriter. Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor, came up with the design in 1868 after working for several years on a new and improved typewriter that would help him get his stories down faster. The device he first developed was a hassle. Like most typewriters of the day, the keys were arranged in alphabetical order and mounted on metal arms that swung up to tap the letter onto tape that was pressed into a piece of paper curled around a cartridge. When neighboring keys were depressed at the same time or in rapid succession, the arms would collide and the typewriter would jam. Because the typed letters appeared beneath the paper carriage, you couldn’t immediately see if a jam had caused a mistake until you raised the carriage to inspect what you had typed.
Fed up with these problems, Sholes decided to rearrange the alphabetical keyboard he had been using and place the keys of commonly used letter pairs, like “th” and “st,” far away from each other so that their metal arms wouldn’t cross or collide. This helped him avoid jams and allowed him to work more efficiently. The concept worked, and Sholes sold the idea to Remington, a leading typewriter manufacturer, to replace their alphabetical layout. Frequently used letter combinations were separated on opposite sides of the keyboard and, as a clever addition, the letters in “TypeWriter” were put on the top row of keys. This way salesmen could easily tap out the brand name when hawking their product.16
While the QWERTY design lessened the frequency of jams, the layout still left much to be desired and did not allow typists to maximize their sp
eed. For one thing, with the QWERTY keyboard, about three thousand English words are typed with the left hand alone (spend a few minutes typing secret or exaggerated), and only about three hundred are typed with the right (such as milk, jolly, and hill).17 But most people are much faster at typing with their right hand. Not only is the right hand the preferred hand for a majority of people, but there are actually fewer letters on the right side of the QWERTY keyboard because much of the bottom right-hand row contains punctuation. Fewer letters to choose from means that it’s easier to select the correct one; that is, having fewer choices leads to a quicker decision. With the QWERTY keyboard layout, people don’t use their fluent right hand as much as would be optimal for typing speed.
The Dvorak keyboard is one popular alternative that gets rid of some of these issues. It’s designed so that successive letters in the English language are typed by alternating hands. The distribution of words typed with the right and left hands is more even. Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple computer, is a big fan of the Dvorak. Some of the fastest typing speeds on record have been set on the Dvorak. According to Wikipedia, the writer Barbara Blackburn holds the 2005 Guinness World Record for the fastest English-language typing speed. She was able to maintain a speed of 150 words per minute for fifty minutes and has been clocked as fast at 212 wpm.18 Yet despite some of the advantages of the Dvorak layout, it hasn’t caught on. The QWERTY keyboard is everywhere—on computers, smartphones, laptops—across the world. And as voice communication continues to be replaced by typing and texting, the QWERTY keyboard is more dominant than ever.