You Can’t Believe Everything You Read
I was attending a presentation of “How To Give Effective Presentations” last Tuesday. You may wonder why I would attend, well, I’m a firm believer that there is always something to learn. I’m always looking for new or improved information, tips or tricks to bring you…. I was disappointed though, as the “professional” quoted a long-held belief about non-verbal communication.
(I won’t get into my rant about beliefs and questioning what we think we know, what we know we know, and what we believe we know—that would be a whole other note to you.)
She repeated the long held belief that "non-verbal communication is 93% of the entire communication,"— well, not exactly…. You may have read that formula numerous times, the numbers are accurate in the context in which they were achieved — remember like in most things context rules.
The often quoted formula for the power of non-verbal communication is:
7% of the understood meaning from the language (the words used)
38% of the understood meaning is from the other auditory components such as tone and volume
55% of the understood meaning is from the visual component such as the non-verbals including gestures
But that is not exactly true in reality and it’s important that we understand why it is not — these numbers came from controlled studies in a lab. Anytime we see numbers, particularly ones we choose to use to guide us, we need to be very clear about how those numbers were formulated. First we have to understand that research studies rarely reflect real life situations. For instance, these numbers came from a series of research studies by Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, and his team at UCLA, that looked at how we use and understand interpersonal communication. He was interested in how listeners get their information when listening to a speaker, some questions he was looking to answer were:
- Was it from his/her "attitude"?
- Was it from their facial expression, their tone, or their words – or a combination of those?
- And what if they were sending mixed or conflicting signals – their body did not match their words?
The researchers found they could not truly segregate the different components. The measures they came up with by combining studies was they did come up with the measures of .07, .38, and .55, respectively but noted that the combined effect of communication had to be taken in consideration. Mehrabian and his team has written about the deep limitation to their research. The notes of the researchers own concerns is rarely stated, now that is it out in the common "knowledge base." So, that’s where these widely (mis)quoted numbers come from.
Do The Numbers Really Matter?
But numbers aside, the fact is that listeners take it all in, the visual, tonal and verbal cues and the percentage derived from each will vary depending on the action of the speaker, the context of the communication, how well they speaker and listener know each other, on and on…even what mood they are in….
Even if we edit the 93% number and only said it was half, that would still be 46.5%, (almost 50%)! No matter what the true numbers are, even if it is 50%, the bottom line is we all know that when someone’s body isn’t matching what their mouth is saying we walk away from the experience wondering in the best case, if we understood what they were saying, and in the worse case, if we can trust them. What we do with our body language including facial expressions, gestures and body movements is important. We need to strive to have our body be an accurate reflection of not just our words, but the true meaning of our words.
References:
Mehrabian, Albert and Morton Wiener, 1967, "Decoding of inconsistent communications," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 6:109-114
Mehrabian, Albert and Susan R. Ferris, 1967, "Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels," Journal of Consulting Psychology 31:248-252.
Daniel Druckman, Richard M. Rozelle, and James C. Baxter. 1982. Nonverbal Communication: Survey, Theory, and Research" Sage Publications 1982, pages 84-85.
