Most often, though, the palm-up gesture — like other gestures — is used unconsciously. Skilled politicians instinctively woo audiences with the upraised palms that made Mr. Clinton and Ronald Reagan seem so genial and helpful (or contrite, when the occasion demanded). Veteran politicans know to avoid palm-down gestures unless they’re attacking enemies or trying to look strong (like Richard Nixon desperately flashing his victory signs as his presidency was collapsing).
In “Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance,” Adam Kendon of the University of Pennsylvania explains what a difference the palm’s direction makes:
Gestures of the Open Hand Prone or “palm down” family are used in contexts where something is being denied, negated, interrupted or stopped, whether explicitly or by implication. Open hand Supine (or “palm up”) family gestures, on the other hand, are used in contexts where the speaker is offering, giving or showing something or requesting the reception of something. It also includes gestures in which, very often, both hands, sustained in the Open Hand Supine pose, are moved away from one another, as if being withdrawn from the space immediately in front of the speaker. The semantic theme of these gestures is that of the withdrawal of action or of non-intervention.
David Givens, the author of the Nonverbal Dictionary, traces these gestures to “paleocircuits” in the brain and spinal cord inherited from ancient vertebrates that adopted supine or aggressive postures depending on the situation:
The supinated (palm-up) hand originates as a component of the larger protective-crouch posture. As such, it suggests harmlessness instead of aggression, like the pronated (palm-down) hand suggests as a component of the larger push-up to a high-stand posture. These basic postures and their parts, which are wired into the vertebrate neuromuscular system, are tell-tale signs of how a chimp–or human–feels: e.g., submissive-harmless or dominant-aggressive.
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