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The steeple hand pose reads charismatic
The winning gesture
Participants watched videotapes of leaders and rated their charisma, specifically their gestures. Out of all the gestures in the videos, one single gesture won. The steeple is the calmest, broadest gesture for the hands, and it works on an armrest or on a table.
Other hand cues
Drumming the fingers undoes the effect and reads as evil. Touching pinky to pinky to form a triangle tends to feel grounded.
Rubbing the hands together is a smaller cue of excitement. Before sharing something good, the gesture signals that something good is coming, like generating conversational heat. The common thread in every gesture is visible hands.
How did researchers test teaching charisma?
In a 2011 study in Academy of Management Learning and Education, John Antonakis, Marika Fenley, and Sue Liechti trained managers in 12 charismatic leadership tactics. These included metaphors, stories, contrasts, rhetorical questions, three-part lists, and animated voice and facial expression. After the training, raters judged the managers as more charismatic than before. Antonakis described the work in a 2012 Harvard Business Review article.
Can a few seconds of video predict impressions?
In 1993 Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal showed students silent video clips of college teachers lasting as little as 6 seconds and asked them to rate the teachers' behavior. These ratings predicted the teachers' end-of-semester student evaluations. They called these brief samples thin slices of behavior. Later studies applied thin-slice judgments to many settings, including court trials and job interviews.