How much of the meaning of a message is communicated nonverbally?
How much of the meaning of a message is communicated nonverbally? I know you have heard statistics in a presentation or read it in a book or online. The invalid statistic that has been promoted by many speakers and trainers states that 55% of the meaning of communication is body language, 38% is in tonality, and 7% rests in the words themselves. Yep I said INVALID.
Albert Mehrabian PHD, of the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA), is credited as the originator of the 55%, 38%, 7% Rule. He and his colleagues conducted two studies on communication patterns and published the studies in professional journals in 1967.
Mehrabian later discussed the results of the studies in two books in the early 1970s. The results of the studies were widely circulated in the press, in abbreviated form, leading to a misunderstanding of the original research and inaccurate generalizations of the conclusions. They were even misquoted in the textbooks I had in grad school and the one I used when I taught body language for four years at Florida State University.
Below, an article about the research conducted by Albert Mehrabian.
Non-Verbal Communication
A Linear Model for the Inference of Attitudes from Multichannel Communications
Mehrabian and Wiener (1967) and M and Ferris (1967) investigated the combined effects of consistent or inconsistent verbal-vocal communications and consistent and inconsistent facial-vocal communications of attitude respectively. Both studies involved nine sets of communication stimuli.
In the M W study, verbal-vocal communications were prepared so that three degrees of positive verbal content were associated with three degrees of vocally expressed attitude. Having been judged for amount of liking conveyed, the words honey, thanks and dear were selected as instances of positive contents ( the judgments of these words had comparable mean values and standard deviations ). Similarly, the words maybe, really and oh were selected as comparable instances of neutral contents; and the words don’t, brute and terrible were selected as comparable instances of negative contents.
Two female speakers were employed to read each of the nine selected words in positive, neutral and negative vocal expressions. For these three conditions, respectively, the speakers spoke the words, regardless of content to convey, liking, high evaluation, or preference; a neutral attitude, that is, neither liking nor disliking; and an attitude of dislike, low evaluation, or lack of preference towards the target person. All possible combinations of two speaker conditions, three vocal conditions, three content conditions, and three instances of each content condition were recorded on tape.
To obtain the independent effects of the vocal and content components of these recordings, and to relate these to the effects of the total vocal content messages, Mehrabian and Wiener (1967) had three different groups of subjects listen to these recorded messages. One group was asked to judge the degree of liking conveyed by each message, relying only on the meanings of the words used and not on the vocal expression. The second group was asked to judge the degree of liking relying only on the vocal component and not on the meanings of the words used. Finally, the third group formed their judgments of liking on the basis of all the information combined in each message.
The results of the study showed that the vocal component in the various messages primarily determined the subjects’ judgments of affect from the total messages (content and vocal components combined), and that the content component of inconsistent messages had a negligible contribution to the affect inferred from such statements.
As you will realize now, the rule of 55%, 38%, 7% is not correct and only applicable in situations where messages are incongruent.
Mehrabian actually stated (Anchor Point, 1994) that he never intended his results to be applied to normal conversation (and assumedly not to public speaking either). He only wanted to help his readers resolve incongruent messages regarding liking and disliking. Thus, his research has useful, yet limited applications, which have been blown out of proportion.
Each day I look at the little black and tan furry face of my dog Bo as I say, “Walk outside?” and watch him grin. Yes, lips pulled back, squinty eyed, he smiles. Then his whole body wiggles and fills with glee as he leaps and dances around me. Once the door opens he walks beside me, nose sniffing and tail wagging enjoying each grassy smell, happy for each fellow dog, or child who wants to pet him. He is in the moment, as if this walk where the first walk, the only walk, the best walk ever, not the walk we take each day, not the walk we have taken for years. Being with him, watching his body language, I feel what he is feeling. We were connected in joy.