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Hand Gestures and Perceived Influence in Small Group Interaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2013

Fridanna Maricchiolo ,
Stefano Livi ,
Marino Bonaiuto  and
Augusto Gnisci
Fridanna Maricchiolo*
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi Roma Tre (Italy)
Stefano Livi
Affiliation:
Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy)
Marino Bonaiuto
Affiliation:
Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy)
Augusto Gnisci
Affiliation:
Seconda Università di Napoli (Italy)
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Fridanna Maricchiolo, Università degli Studi Roma Tre. Department of Cultural and Educational Studies. Via Milazzo 11B, 00185 Rome (Italy). E-mail: fmaricchiolo@uniroma3.it
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Abstract

A laboratory study was carried out to establish the relative importance of verbal and gestural behavior, as well as their interaction, for perceived social influence in more or less competitive small groups. Forty women (psychology students) participated in leaderless small group discussions of different sizes (fourmember and eight-member): at the end, each member rated the perceived influence in decision-making of every other member. Verbal dominance coding is based on traditional quantitative conversational dominance (number of talk turns). Gestural coding (conversational, ideational, object-adaptor, self-adaptor gestures) is based on classical gesture classifications. Beside a substantial effect of verbal dominance, the main result is that frequency of object-adaptors and conversational (only in large groups) and ideational (in both small and large groups) gestures increases perceived influence scores particularly when the verbal dominance of the speaker is low.

Se ha realizado un estudio de laboratorio para establecer la importancia de la conducta gestual y verbal, así como su interacción, en la influencia social percibida en grupos pequeños más o menos competitivos. Cuarenta mujeres (estudiantes de psicología) participaron en discusiones de grupo sin líder de diferentes tamaños (cuatro miembros y ocho miembros): al final, cada miembro valoró la influencia percibida en la toma de decisiones de cada uno de los otros miembros. El código de dominancia verbal está basado en la dominancia cuantitativa conversacional (número de turnos de habla). El código gestual (conversacional, ideacional, adaptador-objeto, gestos auto-adaptadores) está basado en clasificaciones gestuales clásicas. Además de un efecto sustancial de la dominancia verbal, el resultado principal es que la frecuencia de adaptadores-objeto y gestos conversacionales (sólo en grupos grandes) e ideacionales (tanto en grupos pequeños como grandes) incrementa los valores de influencia percibida, particularmente cuando la dominancia verbal del hablante es baja.

Keywords

verbal and nonverbal dominancehand gesturesperceived influencesmall groupdominancia verbal y no verbalgestos manualesinfluencia percibidagrupos pequeños
Type
Research Article
Information
The Spanish Journal of Psychology , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , November 2011 , pp. 755 - 764
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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