What's the deal with "We look at the hands first?"

What was the issue?

Slide 7 in section 3.2 referenced "We look to the hands first" when opening the section about the importance of building trust in a first impression by using hand gestures.

This exact phrase is not found in any direct studies, but rather was a culmination of our learning from a few different studies (reproduced below). This led to some confusion and concern around the scientific validity of that slide. Here is some detail on the origins of the slide. The updated slide is described below and already available.

A selection of relevant studies that lead to this initial claim are listed here:

• Our brain prioritizes processing of visual stimuli that might be a threat to us. It gives even greater priority when those visual stimuli are physically proximate to a specific part of our body than when generally a threat to us. (Van Damme, Stefaan, et al. "Does the sight of physical threat induce a tactile processing bias?: Modality-specific attentional facilitation induced by viewing threatening pictures." Brain research 1253 (2009): 100-106.)
• Our eyes locate and fix on fearful faces or body postures (things with high "emotional content") faster than it does neutral ones. (Bannerman, Rachel L., et al. "Orienting to threat: faster localization of fearful facial expressions and body postures revealed by saccadic eye movements." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences (2009): rspb-2008.)
• The brain has dedicated cells to scanning the face and hands of another human, rather than just overall visual processing. (Wurtz, Robert H., and Erik R. Kandel. "Perception of motion, depth, and form." Principles of neural science (2000): 548-571.)

These are all examples of bottom-up processing of visual stimuli in a new encounter situation (vs top-down). Bottoms-up means processing that is performed "automatically" or without conscious thought, whereas top-down is thought led. This happens when it comes to looking at the face and hands. Due to how the sections are organized (the face is discussed in detail later on) we prioritized talking about the hands in its own. This lead to the misleading claim.

How was it corrected?

Section 3.2, slide 7 was updated to address this claim and directly reference findings from a different study. We now describe how the brain has dedicated areas for scanning both the hands and face. The studies mentioned above are all fascinating, but we deemed them unnecessary to the understanding of the core concepts for the end recipient. This is now a simplified and directly verifiable way to teach the slide.

Where do I get the updated material?

As always you can find the most up to date materials by logging in to  Trainer Resources.