At last Mehrabian has gone very public to explain why the long recycled percentages for visual, voice tone and words during communication were NOT what he said and NOT what he meant.
image used with permission: Sweet J
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3 Comments
Nice find Paul – this has been one of my bug-bears for years
It’s all about congruence – Mehrabians figures only come into play when our voice, vocabulary and body language send out mixed messages!!
If our voice, vocab and body language are sending the same message then you cannot apply Mehrabians research findings because he was measuring how people gain meaning when people were sending mixed messages.
Another bug of mine is when we use it in telephone skills training – but I might save that one for a future post
From a linguist’s perspective, it’s encouraging to hear that words do matter. Yes, they do. But there are still erroneous claims in this Youtube presentation. Body language and facial expressions are not universal, meaning that we would still need to learn Hungarian body and facial language in order to communicate well with a Hungarian, language or not. Obviously, this field of communication studies, that is, understanding the role of words plus other communicative parts of the speech act, still deserves a lot of investigation.
Hi Jenny,
Very interesting comments. Thank you.
I agree with you that the use body language and facial expressions is not very helpful unless you have calibrated the person concerned first.
It makes me cross when people talk about a universal language when they are referring to facial expressions and posture. There is no such thing.
Thanks for your comments,
Regards
Paul
4 Trackbacks
[...] with our recent postings about Mehrabian’s percentages for voice, vocabulary and body language in communication, busting the myth that e-learning is more effective than the classroom and the [...]
Finally!!! very interesting. Thanks @bftrainer. http://www.brainfriendlytrainer.com/theory/visual-voice-tone-and-words-myth-finally-busted
Is communication 7% Verbal/93% Non-verbal? No. | http://abcjr.me/2n
[...] M.D., cites a statistic that women use 20,000 words a day to men’s measly 7,000. Like the misinterpreted conclusion of Albert Mehrabian, who said that 7% of communication is the words, 38% is body language and 55% [...]