Many of us speak with our hands, but what is this signaling really communicating?
Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow, an expert on gestures and professor of psychology and comparative human development at the University of Chicago, shares the significance of gesturing when speaking, and ways our hands can reveal more than we realize.
Plus… learn what NOT to do with your hands to avoid unintended insults while traveling to do different countries!
Dr. Phil Stieg: Most of us know someone who uses their hands when they talk, but we rarely think about what they are trying to say with them or why they are using gestures rather than words.
Today, we are here to discuss a fascinating book, Thinking with Your Hands, the surprising science behind how gestures shape our thoughts. Our guest is the author, Susan Goldin-Meadow, professor of psychology and comparative human development at the University of Chicago. Susan is the preeminent expert on how and why we talk with our hands.
Susan, thanks so much for being with us today.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Thank you for having me.
Phil Stieg: So what constitutes a gesture? As I thought about it, it would be face, arms, hands, posture, all of it. Is that true?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Yeah, I think all of it does constitute gesture. But what I study in particular are the gestures that go along with speech, the movements that you produce as you’re talking. What I’m really interested in looking at is the content of your communications that come out through your hands.
Phil Stieg: What I found most interesting in reading the book is that gestures that blind people have are very similar to the gestures that sighted people have. So what does that say about the innateness of gestures?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Well, I think even before you get to the structure of them, the fact that blind children or blind people who have never, ever, ever seen anybody gesture move their hands when they talk is, to me, a really important fact about gesture. It suggests it’s totally resilient, and it’s tied to language, tied to our hands, tied to our mouths, tied to speech.
I think gesture is a very, very important part of language. The innateness of gesture can go even farther. So gesture actually varies as a function of the language that you speak.
So if you speak English in English, when we talk about going down a hill, we say going downhill, and it’s all within a single clause. And the way we gesture it, is to do a going down movement at the same time as walking, or rolling if you happen to be rolling down a hill.
But Turkish is different. So in Turkish, what you do is you say, I go down by rolling. So it’s two separate clauses. And the way you express it in gesture is you do a go down gesture and then a walking or a rolling or whatever. Okay, so it’s two separate gestures.
So one really interesting question is, what do blind people do in America and in Turkey? Do they have to see those different structures in order to gesture like a native gesture, or can they just pick it up, presumably from the language? Want to guess? Well, what do you think? What’s your guess?
Phil Stieg: I would suspect. Well, I’ve read the book. I’d be cheating.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Okay. All right, so it’s from your language. They look like regular old speakers, which is sort of interesting. Those aspects of language seep into your gesture, and your gesture and language form one single system.
Phil Stieg: I thought one of the most fascinating things that you talked about is how gesturing can facilitate our ability to learn.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: What we discovered when we started to look at children learning about number, for example, is that often when the children talk about or explain their answers, they produce gestures that differ from the speech. So let me give you an example of that.
So if you give to children two rows of checkers and ask them, do they have the same number of checkers in each row? Kid says, of course, yes. And then you spread one row out. And children who are non-conservers, say, “no, it’s a different number of checkers” which is, of course, wrong.
But the interesting thing is how they explain their answers. So some children will say, well, they’re different because you move them and do a little moving gesture. Gestures and speech are conveying sort of the same information. But other children will say they’re different because you move them and at the same time convey, sort of pair up the checkers in the first row with the checkers in the second row using a pointing gesture.
That’s very clever because that’s beginning to understand the one to one correspondence between the checkers. The children never talk about one to one correspondence. That information, that knowledge is stuck in their hands.
Phil Stieg: So is it just like a picture is worth a thousand words, a gesture is worth a thousand words also?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Well, maybe. I mean, the words are not unimportant. And in fact, at some point, what we’re trying to do is to get those kids into a state where they can articulate when they do know the knowledge, not only in their hands, but also coming out of their mouths in their language. So it’s a path on the way to understanding.
Phil Stieg: So I’m a parent, and after reading your book, I want to understand how I can look at my child’s gestures to really learn what they’re thinking and what they’re trying to emote. And tell me about, well, I think, what should I do?
What should I be looking for? What are the different types of gestures and the significance or meaning of those?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: In the book, I tried to actually go through a little picture of what gestures typically look like so that parents can figure out when their kids are not on the right track, or they’re a little slower or a little faster or whatever. But in general, I think parents pay attention to gestures all the time, and I think they should respond to them.
So, for example, if the kid points at a cup and says, daddy, he doesn’t mean the cup is his daddy. He means that it’s daddy’s cup. And if mom then responds, yes, that’s daddy’s cup, that’s really good input at that moment. That’s sort of a teachable moment for the kid to try to learn how to say daddy’s cup.
So if you respond to gestures and translate it into speech or elaborate on it, you can have a real conversation with your child. If you respond to the child’s gestures before the kid can talk.
Phil Stieg: So also you suggest that gesturing can reveal your hidden thoughts, or an unconscious bias, I guess, is another way I would express it. Can you give me an example of that?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Well, all of the examples we’ve been talking about are unconscious, but I think what you’re referring to is a bias in sort of social attitude.
So one of my students, Anjana Chandran, has been interested in how people gesture when they’re doing evaluations of groups, when they’re talking about groups.
So she’s found some instances, usually when you say you’re talking about a competent person, you raise your hand high, incompetent person, you raise your hand low. And people do this routinely.
But what she found when she asked people to compare men and women on the basis of leadership. So you might say women and men are equally good leaders, but when you say it, you say women and men are equally good leaders, and you put your hand closer to your chin when you’re talking about women, and you put your hand closer to your forehead when you’re talking about men. So you’ve talked equality, but your gestures really suggest that not so equal.
I don’t think that people are very conscious of their gestures. For some gestures, like when you do “okay” or you do thumbs up, these emblems, you know you’re doing them and you do it consciously.
But these kinds of gestures, where we just put men and women or talk about leaders and we just wave our hands around, are not usually formed with intent. So they tend to reflect things that we have on our minds but aren’t necessarily even aware of ourselves
Phil Stieg: And therefore not necessarily what we believe. It’s just sort of an extraneous motion?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: No, I think it’s what we believe, but we may not know we believe it. They’re communicating information. Whether they intend to communicate that information or not is part of the question.
That’s when the anecdote that I gave at the beginning of the book, where they took Princess Diana as she was being brought into the Royal Society, and they tried to train her to be a better communicator, they tied up her hands. They literally tied up her hands in the crown, at least, because they didn’t want her expressing things willy nilly, and they didn’t want her expressing emotion, uncontrolled emotion.
Phil Stieg: I was also amazed. Everybody kind of knows about the phantom limb where you feel you’ve lost a leg but you feel your toe itch. Tell us about phantom gestures.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Well, there is a wonderful example that Ramachandran described in his book of a patient who was born without limbs, and she was talking to him, and she says, my hands move when I talk. They’re moving now as I talk to you. And of course, she has no hands, she has no arms, but she feels the movement of her hands when she’s speaking.
The thing I find really striking is then she says, “but you know, when I walk, and people swing their arms when they walk, my arms aren’t moving then.”
So her feeling was that her hands move with her speech and when she’s talking, but not when she’s walking. Very, very specific to talking and to language. Pretty cool, actually.
Phil Stieg: Everything about this, it makes me appreciate now when I’m interacting with people, I’m certainly watching everything much more intensely.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: That was the goal! good.
Phil Stieg: Trying to glean as much information. It’s going to help me on my interviews when I’m interviewing resident applicants to really try to understand what they’re saying.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Indeed … indeed.
Interstitial theme music
Narrator: Most of the gestures we make while speaking are unconscious acts that help us to better communicate our thoughts and feelings. But then there are those embarrassing times when we use a deliberate gesture to convey a message– and it completely backfires.
This is especially common when Americans are overseas.
Sound effects: “Hail to the Chief”
During a tour of Australia in January of 1992, President George H. W. Bush flashed a V-for-victory sign to an Aussie crowd.
Crowd gasps
What President Bush Senior didn’t realize was that when he flashed that sign with his palm turned toward him, he was giving the Australians the equivalent of our rude middle-finger gesture.
A few decades earlier, Richard Nixon had stepped off Air Force One in South America and given the waiting crowd a friendly OK sign, with his thumb and forefinger forming a circle. Unfortunately, here too it meant the same as the American middle-finger gesture.
And who can forget former President Trump’s signature “thumbs up” gesture, which in Iran and several other Middle Eastern countries literally means “sit on this” – or, more rudely, “up-yours.”
Presidents are not the only ones among us who need to be aware of these potential gestural faux-pas.
The traditional “high-five” gesture exchanged by football fans after every touchdown to indicate “congratulations” or “well done” may also be problematic. Showing the five spread fingers with the palm facing out can be seen as an insult in Middle Eastern and North African countries and is interpreted as saying “shut up” or “talk to the hand.” In Greece it is seen as a sign of rubbing dirt on a person’s face.
Finally, fans of the University of Texas Longhorns football team immediately recognize the famous “Hook-‘em Horns” hand gesture – making a fist and raising the index finger and pinky. Barack Obama used that one appropriately when he was in Austin, but nobody should “flash the horns” while in Italy, Spain or many South American countries where you will be unknowingly declaring that your wife has been unfaithful to you.
Sound effects: 2005 Presidential Inaugural Ceremony
In 2005 another Bush learned the importance of hand gestures.
Die-hard Texan Jenna Bush flashed the “Hook-‘em Horns” gesture during her father’s second inaugural. In Norway that same gesture is associated with Satanic cults. Norwegians were aghast at the thought that the daughter of one American president (and granddaughter of another) could be a devil worshipper.
Just one of countless examples of how American hands help shape our reputation around the world.
Interstitial closing music.
Phil Stieg: I was somewhat surprised where in the book you state that nonverbal gestures have been banned in deaf education. It would seem to me, based on what you’re saying, that, my gosh, you’d want them to use gestures.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Right. There are differences of viewpoint in deaf education. There are some who believe that if you, and they believe this about sign language, too, that if you learn to sign, or if you learn to gesture, you’re relying on this modality and you won’t develop your auditory skills.
So if you’re going to sort of rely on this visual manual modality, you won’t get the full benefit of the oral skills. So they take that visual manual modality away. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Phil Stieg: So they just forbid the child from moving their hands? They tape them down.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Well, sort of. Yeah, because the idea. Not tape them down, but the idea in this is a while ago in oral education, the idea was that children should learn to talk, so they should focus on lips, reading lips, feel the vibrations of the voice, and really concentrate on this oral cue that they’re not really able to hear well. And so it needs real focus. And the thought was, if you have gesture surrounding that cue, maybe you’ll just rely on the gesture and you won’t take advantage of the cue.
I actually don’t think that’s a very good argument. I think actually, for hearing kids in particular, we encourage gesture and we have now “baby sign” in order to encourage them. So it seems a little crazy to deprive deaf children of gesture when you’re giving hearing children gesture. But, it is what it is.
Phil Stieg: You suggest in the book also that gestures can be used for treating children with traumatic brain injury, autism, Down’s syndrome. Can you give examples of how that’s being used?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: So it’s not necessarily for treating. I think the biggest contribution it could make at the moment is maybe diagnosis. So we have a really nice study that we’ve done of children with brain injury who, at 18 months, they were below the norm, below the typical in terms of the number of words that they produced spontaneously. But half of the brain injured children gestured at the same rate as children typically do, and half gestured below the norm. That’s at 18 months. They’re all below the norm for words.
Now, if you fast forward to 30 months, what happens when you look at these kids is their gesture rates are still the same.
The ones who gestured in the normal range stayed in the normal range. The ones who gestured in the low range stayed in the low range.
But with respect to words where they were all low initially, now the ones who gestured are within the normal range for speech, and the ones who didn’t gesture are still below the normal range.
So what that suggests is that the gesture was indicating that these children are going to be okay and you don’t really need to intervene, you don’t really need to do much.
But for the other children, the ones who fail to gesture, intervention would be a really good thing to do.
So it sort of tells us where we should put our resources and who really needs the help that we can give them.
Phil Stieg: Is gesturing language-based or is it culturally based, socioeconomically based, gender-based? What factors play a role in how individuals gesture?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Yeah, I think it depends on which aspects of gesture we look at. Gesture is definitely influenced by the language that you’re speaking. That’s the Turkish-English example that I gave you.
There are certainly cultural differences. You can gesture more flamboyantly. As you said, the Italians tend to gesture big. They use big movements, whereas northern Europeans are more likely to gesture close to the chest. So all of that is cultural and is influenced by where you grow up and who you’re surrounded by.
There may be gesture differences in whether you’re a female or a male, but the kinds of things that I’m looking at, the structural things, tend not to differ by gender or by culture or by, I don’t know, whatever you want to talk about.
Phil Stieg: So women gesture the same way men do?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: They seem to-
Phil Stieg: -within a culture.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Right. And given the kinds of things that I’m interested in, women have different bodies and they use-I suspect it does look different, but I think in terms of the structure and the kinds of information that you convey, I’m not sure that it is different. And we found no sex differences in our kids, our little ones. When we look at the acquisition of math or the acquisition of language or whatever.
Phil Stieg: I think you’re going to have to get her tapping of the microphone into this to just show that she is – she gestured again.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: I’m sorry!
Phil Stieg: No, no, no, I think it’s good. It shows that you’re gesturing.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: I am definitely gesturing. And this microphone, which you told me to hold close, is too close. Sort of cramping my style.
Phil Stieg: In the many years that you’ve been doing this, were there one or two “ah ha moments” you had. Oh my God, I’ve discovered the holy grail here in terms of gesturing. Things that you’re proud of, things that just got you so excited, like you feel like this has transformed your field.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Well, I do think that when we first started studying kids, we discovered that gesture and speech don’t always convey the same information when you’re just looking at it, even if you’re looking at it intently.
I think you don’t recognize that gesture and speech might be conveying different information. And it’s that discovery that the two don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. That, I think, is really important because gesture can convey information that you don’t know is on your mind, and that the listener will take in, and not recognize it came out of your gestures. I think that’s important. I really do.
Phil Stieg: So do you think, as we teach grammar in school, do you think there should be lessons on gesturing so that people know the appropriate, or do you want it to be more spontaneous?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: I actually think that it needs to be more spontaneous, that it’s sort of tapping into all these implicit ideas and that you don’t really want to think hard about it. But I’m a little ambivalent about that because at one point we told kids to gesture. We said, okay, next time you explain this math problem, I want you to use your hands while you’re talking. And what I really thought was going to happen is that the gestures and the speech would then match each other perfectly and that all of those wonderful things that gesture does for you would just disappear.
But that’s not what happened. Actually, what happened is that the kids started to gesture because we told them to, and they would express ideas that they hadn’t expressed before. So they would produce these mismatches, and the ideas that they were expressing often were correct.
So by telling them to gesture, we got them to produce all of these new ideas that they hadn’t produced before. So I was surprised because I thought once you put it under conscious control, it’s going to change it the way it works. But what I think is happening is that it’s not really under conscious control.
So what’s under conscious control is that you put your hands up there, but what you do with your hands, it’s a little like breathing. If you say, okay, concentrate on breathing or concentrate on walking, you screw yourself up so you can’t concentrate on breathing too much or you won’t breathe, or you can’t concentrate on walking too much.
So I think that we just spontaneously get the hands up there. We tell them it’s up there, and then it goes off. It goes off on its own program.
Phil Stieg: The human brain is hardwired for speech. Is it hardwired for gesturing?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: I think it is because of the blind, you don’t need input to do it. You just spontaneously gesture. We are trying now to figure out, it’s been hard to study gesture using these brain imaging techniques because you can’t move in an fMRI scanner. You have to sit still and you can’t move your hands. But there’s new technology, f-neers, which is a cap on your head, and you are allowed to move. You can move your hands.
So we are now studying kids as they acquire a math problem during the training, and they can move, and so we can look at their brains when they’re producing gestures that mismatch their speech.
I really want to know what’s going on up there when your gestures are saying one thing and your hands are saying another. I think that would be very interesting. So we’re trying to do that.
Phil Stieg: In your book, Thinking with Your Hands, in the introduction, I thought you gave an excellent description of what the purpose of that book was in your mind. Can you state that for us today?
Susan Goldin-Meadow: I don’t remember which one you think is so important, but for me..
Phil Stieg: The one that you think is important.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: I think that the book just reveals a whole dimension of us that most people don’t take seriously.
We always use our hands when we talk, and I think we take in information from people who are using their hands, but we don’t recognize it.
I don’t think we should have courses in gesture, but I think being told to pay attention to gesture, and maybe being a little bit more cognizant of what you’re doing with your hands, can improve things.
Phil Stieg: See, I’d be more emphatic than you because I think that part of emotional IQ is the ability to observe another individual’s communication form.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Okay.
Phil Stieg: And part of that is posture, facial expression, hand motion. Putting that all together, I think, is extremely important in trying to understand what that person is communicating. I find it immensely useful when meeting a patient because they don’t always want to tell you what’s going on.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Right. They don’t always want to, and they may not even know what’s going on. And so I do think that good clinicians, good teachers, good parents make use of this skill all the time. They use it, and they use it to good effect, to sort of get into the minds of their listeners. Sometimes lawyers use it, and I don’t know that they’re using it to good effect.
I think there’s an undercurrent of conversation that goes on between people in gesture, and it isn’t always recognized, but it’s there and it influences us. It’s a two way street. And I guess the point of the book is to really make people a little bit more conscious of it and see if it can be brought, harnessed for even more effective use.
Phil Stieg: Susan Goldin-Meadow, thank you so much for being with us and talking about your book, Thinking with Your Hands.
You’ve revealed to us the importance of gestures in terms of communication, but even more importantly, in terms of formulating our ideas and learning. And as a parent, understanding our children’s gestures.
Thank you so much for being with us. It’s been an absolutely delightful time.
Susan Goldin-Meadow: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.