Jack Neel tests whether hand gestures make it harder to lie by telling two stories about outings with her daughter, one true and one made up. A listener has to guess which is real. The experiment shows how gestures and delivery shape what people believe.
Is it hard to lie while using hand gestures?
I'm gonna tell you two stories. One is gonna be real, one's gonna be fake. Yesterday I was with my daughter and we're making cupcakes, and she is like, Mom, I want pink cupcakes. I'm like, okay, but it's for a boy's birthday party. And she's like, I don't care, I want pink cupcakes. And so she goes, she grabs the pink dye, and she puts it in all the different little cupcake tins, and it comes out, and we give it to the boy, and he's like, but I love blue. Okay, that's story number one. Story number two, so this weekend I was with my daughter and she was like, Mom, I want to go swimming. And I was like, no, it's freezing cold, it's February, we're not going swimming. And she's like, but we could wetsuits. I was like, I still don't think that's gonna work. I still think it's cold. So while I was inside in the kitchen, she went up, she got her wetsuit on, and I looked outside and she was in the pool. Which story is real?
That's hard. I would say the first one was real.
They're both lies. I was practicing seeing if I could gesture believably, and I could do it. Your instinct was right, but it was a lie. And my second one was even worse lie. So you were right. So which means people can lie with gesture, but I was thinking about my gestures, right? Like, I was purposely adding gesture to try to be more convincing, and it worked, which is crazy.
