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If you’ve spent any time over the past few years on group video calls, perhaps, by now, the “Zoom wave” feels natural to you—or as natural as it possibly could. How else would you bid farewell to your virtual comrades after a budget meeting, or a graduate seminar, or a family catch-up? Clicking “Leave meeting” and vanishing seems a little harsh. No—you wave. The elbow is bent sharply to fit it in view of the webcam. The motion is exaggerated, as earnest as a golden retriever. You make eye contact with everyone, which is to say no one. Especially now that remote work is common for white-collar workers, people—myself included—are doing the same corny little gesture in front of countless computer screens across the country, all looking like nerds.
I needed to know why we American office workers have decided to collectively embarrass ourselves in this specific way, so I asked some experts. Body-language researchers told me that although some people probably Zoom-waved before the pandemic, the gesture really took off in the COVID-lockdown era. In December 2019, Zoom had about 10 million meeting participants daily; by April 2020, that number exceeded 300 million. Many people weren’t used to this many group video calls, to frozen screens and unmuting and side-chatting, to feeling disembodied and dislocated and isolated. So perhaps in an effort to make it all feel a little more normal, they started doing the wave at the end of meetings. It quickly became “part of the ritual of signing off,” Spencer Kelly, a Colgate University psychologist, neuroscientist, and gesture researcher, told me.
Today, we’re still in a pandemic, and plenty of people are still video calling. This month, one survey found that about 40 percent of American workers were either fully remote or worked on hybrid schedules; in April, more than 800 million different people across the globe used Zoom. And yet, the Zoom wave’s staying power was not inevitable. Instead, it has stuck around maybe not in spite of its awkwardness, but because of it.
For all their ubiquity, group video calls pose an immense challenge to human communication. In person, we don’t rely solely on words. Humans convey and receive information from highly subtle body language—which is usually lost in a tiny Zoom square. Joe Navarro, a nonverbal-behavior expert and the author of What Every Body Is Saying, told me that even the slight arch of an eyebrow can indicate that you like someone; just the faint lift of a finger paired with brief eye contact might stand in for a goodbye. This ambient, largely subconscious exchange of physical signals makes people feel acknowledged and affirmed, however fleetingly. “We reward each other with these little behaviors,” he said.
Movements can also make people seem more trustworthy. Navarro told me that when people hold their face too still, others don’t tend to like it; even babies react negatively, for instance, to their caregiver’s motionless face. Gestures and expressions convey valuable information, and when those signals are absent, we might fear danger or rejection. Words can deceive us, after all, and body language can reveal a lot about someone’s true feelings or intentions. And gestures can also signal goodwill, just because someone is putting in effort at all. “The fact that you’re defying gravity and burning blood sugar means you really care,” Navarro said, “and it makes a big difference in how you’re perceived.”
On Zoom, small motions are harder to pick up on, so people have adapted by making them larger, more stylized, and, perhaps, a bit gauche. I find myself nodding vigorously through entire Zoom meetings, trying to show my attention to the speaker, to the point that my neck literally gets sore. Others have told me they’ve added gestures to their repertoire that they never would use in person: a big, goofy grin to signal mild amusement, or a thumbs-up or a heart shape with their hands to demonstrate appreciation. Some also use the Zoom feature that lets you show an emoji on your screen—say, the clapping hands, or the “party popper” spewing confetti. Emojis and outsize physical gestures really achieve the same end: They are crystal-clear symbols conveying straightforward sentiments, perfect for a setting in which nuance is so easily lost. When you do the Zoom wave, you’re essentially becoming a sentient emoji yourself.
Highly legible actions with a specific meaning, such as a wave or a thumbs-up, are called “emblem gestures”; you’re conscious of doing them, unlike “co-speech gestures,” which encompass all the little ways people talk with their hands, usually subconsciously. Many new emblem gestures, Kelly told me, spread by imitation, but it’s unclear why some last longer than others. In a sense, emblem gestures are like words: Once a new one is coined, its meaning can change over time, and eventually it might fade out of use. Some randomness is involved.
But the researchers I talked with had some theories about what might give a gesture staying power. Susan Wagner Cook, a University of Iowa psychologist, told me that one is more likely to stick if it’s particularly useful. The Zoom wave certainly is; beyond just expressing cordial warmth, it gives us a way to bookend an interaction—to indicate that a meeting is truly done, and to acknowledge other people’s presence before we leave. And Diana R. Sanchez, who leads the Workplace Technology Research Lab at San Francisco State University, pointed out that the Zoom wave is appropriate for people of different levels of closeness. It might be particularly helpful for workplaces, then: It’s sweet but bland, not too intimate or too cheeky.
A floppy hand wag has also long been used for joining people across a distance. The Zoom wave is obviously an adaptation of the regular wave, which is a common way to call attention to yourself so someone can spot you from far away. You probably wouldn’t wave at someone right next to you, but you’d wave at someone across a room. In a sense, then, it’s fitting for Zoom. Though users can see one another’s faces, they might feel emotionally far from one another—and of course, they usually are physically far too.
When people wave, they trigger reciprocation. Wagner Cook told me that others tend to have a natural response to wave back—perhaps partly because “mirror neurons” can fire when people observe or perform communicative hand gestures. And research suggests that when people move in synchrony, they feel more connected. Typically, people are meant to Zoom wave all at once—though in reality it’s rarely perfectly coordinated. The platform is a cornucopia of lagging connections and inadvertent interruptions; it’s practically defined by being out of sync. But Kelly told me that when someone mimics your motions, it goes from satisfying to creepy if the imitation is too obvious or exact. So the messy Zoom wave might actually hit a psychological sweet spot.
The gesture’s perfect imperfection might explain its ubiquity in a larger sense too. Yes, it has to be unsubtle in order to translate on-screen, but that’s exactly why the Zoom wave is so fitting for this moment. Like a video call itself, it can be weird and uncomfortable, and yet people choose to do it together. In a time when many are feeling socially fragmented, there’s something sweet, even necessary, about that total and shameless sincerity. However isolated we may be, and however much we depend on technologies that keep shifting beneath our feet, we keep trying to find ways back to our humanity and embodiment. So I have to admit: I’m grateful for the stupid gesture, and I’ll carry on doing it. It’s a sign of how profoundly the world has changed—but also how humans, in essential ways, have not.
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