This is the second installment in a four-part series on myth-busting.
April 13, 2022
By Rachel Smith
I wish you could see me right now. I’m not in a writing mood at the moment, so I’ve choreographed an interpretive dance in place of this week’s blog. Don’t worry, I’ve incorporated some gibberish chanting. There won’t be any words, but between my body language and tone of voice, you should be able to decipher 93 percent of what I’m trying to communicate.
Does that sound crazy to you? It should (and not just because I’m uncoordinated and can’t carry a tune). But it’s what we’ve been told in countless blogs and articles—communication is 55 percent body language, 38 percent tone of voice, and only 7 percent verbal.
If that were true, we would be able to go to any country in the world and understand people there despite not knowing the language. If that were true, books would make no sense to us. Like last week’s shrinking-attention-span myth, this oft-shared “scientific fact” is easy to disprove if we stop to think about it even a little bit.
Unlike the shrinking-attention-span myth, this week’s falsehood can be traced directly to two studies done in the 1960s. Both studies were conducted by psychology professor Albert Mehrabian who was exploring message incongruence. He wanted to see how people judged another individual’s attitudes and feelings when that individual’s verbal and nonverbal behavior didn’t match up.
Mehrabian chose a series of positive, negative, and neutral words. He then recorded people saying each of these words with positive, negative, and neutral intonations. Research participants listened to the recorded words and were asked to judge whether the speaker was sympathetic. Mehrabian found that when positive words were paired with a negative intonation, test subjects were 5.5 times more likely to use tone to judge sympathy. When neutral words were paired with facial expressions, subjects were 1.5 times more likely to use the facial expressions to judge sympathy.
Are you wondering what the other studies were that further corroborated these findings? There aren’t any. We’ve all been told that communication is 93 percent nonverbal based on someone listening to a recording of some dude saying “thanks” in a negative tone of voice and saying “terrible” while smiling. That’s it. That is the entirety of the studies that have led people to write things such as, “clinical studies done over the past 40 years” show that communication is only seven percent verbal.
To apply Mehrabian’s findings to all communication in all contexts is a big leap. And just wait until you learn that the studies had 75 and 37 participants respectively and all of them were female psychology undergraduates. Mehrabian himself agrees that people have grossly misinterpreted his results. He has said, “Clearly it is absurd to imply or suggest that the verbal portion of all communication constitutes only seven percent of the message.”
Pinning down what percentage of communication is verbal versus based on tone of voice versus based on body language is a lot like measuring the attention span of a goldfish—it can’t be done. Communication is a process within a context, not a variable that can be divided and measured.
None of this is to say that nonverbal communication isn’t important or that Mehrabian’s research doesn’t tell us anything. We’ve written before about how humans have evolved as highly social creatures in a dangerous environment and how this has impacted how we evaluate others.
Our brains use traits like bones structure to help us determine, completely outside of our consciousness, whether an individual can be trusted. Of course we read one another’s body language and gauge their tone of voice as part of our attempt to understand them and assess their authenticity.
We judge people who nod their head when listening, make eye contact, smile, and have open body posture to be more empathetic than others. Our willingness to trust someone increases by ten percent just by them smiling at us. It must be a genuine smile, though, because we are also able to detect when a smile is fake.
Research from U.C. Berkeley suggests that nonverbal exclamations, or “vocal bursts,” can convey at least 24 kinds of emotion. It clearly illustrates the richness of the human vocal repertoire. We have been primed to pick up on vocal and postural cues. There is no doubt that it’s not only what you say that matters—it’s also how you say it.
The myth of 93 percent of communication being nonverbal probably isn’t hurting anybody, but it is a gross misinterpretation of research results and, when given any thought, simply doesn’t make sense. It also reveals an overall lack of understanding of the complexities of language and human communication.
We’re sticklers for science here at Maestro Group, and we don’t believe in dumbing it down simply to make it easier to communicate or simpler to understand. And just believe me when I say you’re much better off reading something I’ve written than watching anything I’ve choreographed.
Contact Maestro’s myth-busters at mastery@maestrogroup.co to learn more about our training and sales strategy services.
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