Gesture as a Social Marker

Gesture as a Social Marker

Members: Cristina Galusca, Sweta Kaman, Kayden Stockwell, Laurie Bayet

Summary: Gesture and language are used in conjunction to communicate information about the world. Additionally, language transmits social information about its speakers whether or not those speakers want the information to be transmitted. For example, an individual’s language or accent can instantly disclose their cultural and geographical origins. Social categorization and evaluations based on language are frequent in adults and older children, who usually prefer native speakers of their language. Sensitivity to language as a social group marker develops very early in life, and even prelinguistic infants display a visual preference for native, relative to foreign, speakers. However, when someone speaks, they also gesture. And gesture too shows variability across cultures and social groups. Despite its ubiquity in human communication and its variation across cultures, the role of gesture in social evaluations remains largely unknown.

We ran a pilot investigation to learn if adults can discriminate between native and foreign nonverbal behaviors. One hundred American participants completed an online social categorization task, asking them to decide: if speakers in 10-second video clips were American or not American, how confident they were in their judgment, how often they used gestures similar to the speaker, and how often they observed similar gestures in those around them.

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