Four persuasive hand gestures - and one to avoid

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At The Huffington Post there is an article by Monica Torres on August 12, 2022 titled Try holding your hands like this if you want to be a persuasive speaker. She mentions these five hand gestures:

 

Holding your fingers in a precision grip [aka a ring or OK]

Holding up a number to correspond with what you are saying

Holding your hand over your heart

Moving both hands up and down as if a scale

Holding your hands palms up

 

For the first one, the ring or OK (as shown above), Monica explains:

 

“If you want to try incorporating just one hand gesture into your conversation, Clarke said the ‘precision grip’ or ‘the ring’ is one of the easiest to incorporate. It’s one she and other researchers analyzed in a separate study on common hand gestures that entrepreneurs use in a pitch to investors.

 

In this gesture, you bring your thumb and index or middle finger closer together to touch or almost touch. ‘It’s a way of pinching down to an idea,’ Clarke said, that signal to audience that ‘This is a key part of what I’m saying. This is where we need to be paying attention.’ ”

 

But you probably should NOT use that gesture. Wikipedia has both a List of gestures and a web page about the OK gesture. It cautions that the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) gave the Okay Hand Gesture its very own web page in their Hate on Display - Hate Symbols Database. An article by Bobby Allyn at NPR on September 26, 2019 is titled The ‘OK’ hand gesture is now listed as a symbol of hate.

 

In other countries the OK gesture is considered rude. An article by Meghan Jones in the Reader’s Digest on May 10, 2022 titled 10 Common hand gestures that are rude in other countries notes Brazil is one. Another article by David Anderson et al at Business Insider on January 5, 2019 titled 5 everyday hand gestures that can get you in serious trouble outside the US further explains:

 

“Making a circle with your thumb and your index finger is how to signal ‘OK’ in the US. But make the same gesture in Brazil, and you're giving the equivalent to the middle finger - the gesture has ‘insulting and scatological connotations,’ as the New York Times put it. Richard Nixon once raised some eyebrows in the 1950s when he made the gesture in Brazil as he stepped off a plane.”