Presentation skills trainers make a lot of fuss made about the ‘fact’ that only “7% of communication lies in the words†we use. The rest is split between the way you say it and the para-linguistics (body language and all that jazz) that go with it. The figures are often cited, but less often understood….
Ask yourself: can you play charades?
The answer, for me at least, is something like “Yes, but only when I’ve had a drinkâ€. You might be more outgoing than me. Or less. The important point here is that no matter how good you are at it, unless the person miming is cheating and using a formal Sign Language it’s not an easy game.
That’s the whole point. If we could do it straight away it wouldn’t be fun. And yet there are people involved in communications training that blindly and stubbornly claim that the words we use in communication account for only 7% of meaning and 55% of the communication takes place by using body language.
Oh yeah? So how come radio adverts work then? Coupled with “tonality†(that is, the way we say things rather than what we say) the assertion is that a whopping 93% of communication has nothing to do with the words we use. If that was the case, I might just have managed better on holiday in France this year!
Seriously, if you hear a language you’ve never heard before, do you really think you can understand 93% of what the speaker is saying? No? Didn’t think so. And yet there are people buying into this myth. To be fair it’s based upon some scientific research and they’ll probably defend themselves on those grounds: it’s also so widely banded about by various people so that many people regard it as ‘received wisdom’. It isn’t.
Frankly, it’s wrong. Well, actually, it’s not so much ‘wrong’ as wrongly applied. It’s been taken out of context and bandied about with very little real understanding. The person who did the original research, (Prof Albert Mehrabrian of UCLA) made a big thing of pointing out to people that his research was specifically to do with personal likes and dislikes and that it could absolutely not be applied in other contexts. It was laboratory work, not ready to be applied in the real world, yet. It wasn’t generalised or robust enough.
Prof Mehrabian’s work was based upon volunteers in a laboratory saying one word only. That word was “maybe†and he picked it specifically because of it’s neutrality! Given those conditions, it’s not surprising that the ‘value’ of the word was only 7%. In fact it’s perhaps a bit worrying that it was as high as that!
No one’s disputing that there’s more to communication that the words you use. At Curved Vision we have theatrical backgrounds and we are very much aware of the old adage that “It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it†but I also have a thorough training and background is social science and research (PhD and all that.) so we don’t use the 7% stuff when I do the presentation skills training, not because it’s wrong, just because it’s irrelevant. Well, “maybe†it’s irrelevant, but you’d have to hear my tone of voice to know if I mean it!
Best….. Simon
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