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Use Your Hands: How Illustrative Gestures Make Speakers Clearer, More Credible and More Persuasive

12:15 AM, 12/05/2025
Use Your Hands: How Illustrative Gestures Make Speakers Clearer, More Credible and More Persuasive

New research in the Journal of Marketing Research finds that hand gestures that visually mirror what speakers say — called "illustrators" — make speakers seem clearer, more competent and more persuasive. The study combined AI analysis of 200,000 TED Talk segments with experiments involving 1,600 participants and noted links to over 33 million combined video "likes." Illustrative gestures boost processing fluency by helping listeners form mental images, while mismatched or fidgety movements can distract. Brief training (as little as five minutes) appears to improve gesture use.

Speakers Who Use Illustrative Hand Gestures Are Seen As Clearer And More Persuasive

When speakers use hand gestures that visually mirror the ideas they express, audiences judge them as clearer, more competent and more persuasive. That is the central conclusion of new research published in the Journal of Marketing Research, which combined large-scale video analysis of TED Talks with controlled lab experiments to investigate how gestures shape communication.

How the Research Was Done

To study gestures at scale, the research team used AI tools to analyze 200,000 video segments from more than 2,000 TED Talks, detecting and classifying hand movements frame by frame. The big-data analysis was paired with controlled experiments in which 1,600 participants rated entrepreneurs pitching a product.

Key Findings

Both the large-scale and experimental data showed the same pattern: gestures that visually represent what a speaker is saying — called "illustrators" — are linked to better audience evaluations. In the TED Talk dataset, illustrative gestures were associated with higher audience appraisal, reflected by the talks' combined total of more than 33 million online “likes”. In lab studies, speakers who used illustrators were consistently rated as clearer, more competent and more persuasive.

"Illustrators" give listeners a visual shortcut to meaning: they turn abstract ideas into concrete mental images, increasing processing fluency and making messages feel easier to understand.

What Helps — And What Hurts

Not all movement helps. Gestures that do not match the message — random waving, nervous fidgeting or irrelevant pointing — provide no benefit and can distract. The practical takeaway is simple: prioritize clarity over choreography. Use hands to emphasize size, direction or relationships and let movement follow meaning.

Practical Tip

Think about where a gesture naturally illustrates your point: open hands to show scale, converging hands to show connection, or a wave-like motion to describe ups and downs. Small, meaningful gestures beat theatrical flourishes.

Training And Next Steps

The author reports promising pilot results suggesting people can learn to gesture more effectively: even a brief five-minute training improved clarity and persuasiveness in early tests. Future research will examine how gestures interact with voice, facial expression and posture using multimodal AI tools to map the communication patterns that make the most effective speakers.

Author: Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, University of Southern California. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit independent news organization.

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