Communication, Non Verbal and Spoken.

No, what I want tested is the statistical claim of the 7-38-55 ratio of communication.

The claim is that only 7% of the message you're trying to communicate is picked up directly from the words you speak. The rest is purely from intonation (38%) and body language (55%). I know that isn't true and if you think it through, so do you, but it's been said so many times that many people don't even stop to think, "Hey, wait... That can't be right..."

This crackpot theory is basically suggesting that 93% of all our communication is non-verbal. If that's true, then as long as there's consistency between what a person is verbally saying and what their body language and intonation is conveying (in other words, the person speaking must be sincere), then I should be able to understand 93% of any conversation on the globe, no matter what the spoken language is.

Does that sound right to you? Probably not, but that's in essense what this theory says, and people are buying into it without question.

EDIT: I'm not questioning that body language and intonation have a huge impact on how we hear spoken words. For instance, if you meet an old acquaintance and he says, "So great to see you again!", but he's saying it while gritting his teeth and rolling his eyes, you'll seriously doubt that he means what he just said. We pick up on stuff like that all the time, but to say that the words only convey 7% of what's actually being said in ALL cases of communication between people is dubious at best.

You're completely right, but what you're saying isn't what I'm challenging.

This is what it's all about (from the Wiki):

"In his studies, Mehrabian comes to two conclusions. First, that there are basically three elements in any face-to-face communication:

Words
Tone of voice
Nonverbal behaviour (e.g. facial expression)

Secondly, the non-verbal elements are particularly important for communicating feelings and attitude, especially when they are incongruent: If words disagree with the tone of voice and nonverbal behaviour, people tend to believe the tonality and nonverbal behaviour.

It is not the case that non-verbal elements in all senses convey the bulk of the message, even though this is how his conclusions are sometimes misinterpreted. For instance, when delivering a lecture or presentation, the textual content of the lecture is delivered entirely verbally, but the non-verbal cues are very important in conveying the speaker's attitude towards what they are saying, notably their belief or conviction.

Attitudes and congruence

According to Mehrabian, the three elements account differently for our liking for the person who puts forward a message concerning their feelings: words account for 7%, tone of voice accounts for 38%, and body language accounts for 55% of the liking.

For effective and meaningful communication about emotions, these three parts of the message need to support each other - they have to be "congruent". In case of any incongruence, the receiver of the message might be irritated by two messages coming from two different channels, giving cues in two different directions.

The following example should help illustrate incongruence in verbal and non-verbal communication.

Verbal: "I do not have a problem with you!"
Non-verbal: person avoids eye-contact, looks anxious, has a closed body language, etc.

It becomes more likely that the receiver will trust the predominant form of communication, which to Mehrabian's findings is the non-verbal impact of tone+gestures (38% + 55%), rather than the literal meaning of the words (7%). This is known as "the 7%-38%-55% Rule".

It is important to say that in the respective study, Mehrabian conducted experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike), and that the above, disproportionate influence of tone of voice and body language becomes effective only when the situation is ambiguous. Such ambiguity appears mostly when the words spoken are inconsistent with the tone of voice or body language of the speaker (sender).
Misinterpretation

This "7%-38%-55% rule" has been overly interpreted in such a way, that some people claim that in any communication situation, the meaning of a message was being transported mostly by non-verbal cues, not by the meaning of words. This generalization from the initially very specific conditions in his experiments is the common mistake made with regard to Mehrabian's rule. On his website, Mehrabian clearly states:

"Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking. Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like–dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable. Also see references 286 and 305 in Silent Messages – these are the original sources of my findings."

(Further down the page - and this is the important part)

"There are several limitations of the study's applicability to real life, which are largely ignored when the study is now cited outside a scientific context and contribute to the misinterpretation above. First, it is based on the judgment of the meaning of single tape recorded words, i.e. a very artificial context. Second, the figures are obtained by combining results from two different studies which possibly cannot be combined. Third, it relates only to the communication of positive versus negative emotions. Fourth, it relates only to women, as men did not participate in the study. Fifth, other types of nonverbal communication, e.g. body posture, were not included in the studies."


First of all, we've got the original claim of the ratio, which has been challenged many times as stated in the last section above. The original findings were based on a very small test group, consisting of only women, under extremely artificial circumstances and relating only to single words conveying positive or negative emotions. While there is certainly some truth to the findings (we've all encountered incongruency in our daily lives and questioned the validity of the spoken words when body language and tone seem to say something else), the very artificial way of obtaining the specific numbers might mean they're completely wrong.

My personal experience is that there are many other factors at play, such as how well the two people communicating know each other, state of mind of each participant at the time of the exchange, life experience, expectations toward the exchange and the environment and context the exchange takes place in, but these factors are all excluded from Mehrabian's experiment.

The second thing is how this is used in real life and this is the actual reason for me wanting this busted once and for all. As the Wiki also says, so-called "communications experts" make huge bundles of money on taking this (possibly very flawed) theory completely out of context and claiming it as ultimate truth of all communication processes, even though the developer of the theory himself says that the application of it is limited. But people are buying it nonetheless.

Exactly. And that's what the guy who came up with the theory says.

Body language and intonation are only important as far as how someone is feeling about what they're saying and, in turn, how that makes you feel when hearing it. In that sense, those two things are immensely important, but the theory doesn't apply to any and all communications, as the self-proclaimed "communication experts" would like to have us believe.

We're not all left with a huge 93% gap in our understanding of what's being communicated through written words, just because they're not accompanied by someone to listen to and look at while reading them, are we?

so basically he took a valid phenomenon and pulled a conclusion from WAY out in left field.

to put his claim in proper perspective, since you can't see my body language or hear my tone of voice:

7% of the holding strength of a nail is from the nail itself, while 53% is from your technique and 40% is from the brand of hammer; so if you buy the proper hammer and hold it correctly, your joint will still be 93% as strong even if you don't have an actual nail.

The worrying part is I cant find fault with the logic....

40 people a year die fishing.(Or about that, its been a decade since I updated that figure...)
Not out at sea trawler men, no, this is the hobby fisherman sat on a canal or river bank dangling worms.

The most dangerous Australian animal?...
The horse.
More people die from Horse each year than any other animal.
That one I found last year.

in the US, the wild animal that causes the most deaths per year is deer.