The 93% non-verbal communication myth

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away there was an academic called Albert Mehrabian, who - aside from lecturing at California's UCLA and writing a number of tomes and papers - also wrote a book called "Silent Messages". And in that book, he happened to briefly detail some research, where his team had explored how we act alongside what we say in order to accurately get a response from the person we are talking to (1971). As he says, "in our culture, we are excessively sensitized to words" (Mehrabian, 1971, p. 41), and it is "very difficult, unless we have some audio-video record, to identify and to cope with nonverbal expressions of hostility that are cloaked by simultaneous verbal expressions to which we cannot legitimately take exception" (p. 41). In the study, a researcher read single words to university student participants - e.g. 'love' etc - using different tones and expressions, then asked the participants if they felt they understood what the researcher meant (Morgan, 2016). The study aimed to see if the audience could get the researcher's intent despite the difference in tone and delivery (Morgan, 2016).

"One interesting question now arises: Is there a systematic and coherent approach to resolving the general meaning or impact of an inconsistent message? Indeed there is. Our experimental results [...] show [that] Total liking = 7% verbal liking + 38% vocal liking + 55% facial liking. Thus the impact of facial expression is greatest" (Mehrabian, 1971, p. 43)

So the participants "decoded the intent behind the speaker’s words from 'visual clues' 55% of the time, and from 'tone of voice' 38% of the time. Only 7% of the time did the audience go to the actual words" (Morgan, 2016). 

An example given was that of "The fast-talking auctioneer [who] is a champion of inconsistency [. Their] voluble and almost incessant speech shows a great deal of responsiveness, but [their] bland expressions and monotonous voice are at the other extreme — completely unresponsive" (Mehrabian, 1971, p. 43). Perhaps auctioneers were once quite atonal. Not so much these days!

So 55% of meaning comes from the face of the speaker; 38% from the tone; and 7% from the words (Mehrabian, 1971). If we look deep into someone's eyes, while smiling (55% of the message), with a caressing tone of voice (38%) and say we love them (7%), they will get the full force of our consistent message, body language and tone. Yay!

Poor old Albert did NOT mean that only 7% of the message is non-verbal; he was talking about where his participants felt meaning transfer was coming from: the words, the tone or the face. If the message lacks congruence, do we lose sense of the message that the sender is sending us. How we say it is important for message clarity; tone as well as words. If everything is congruent, then our message is better understood by the receiver (Mehrabian, 1971). Perhaps we might be better to say that 45% is what we say and our tone, versus our facial expression?

We should note that the original study was pretty unscientific: it was self-reported; meaning-transfer was not checked for understanding; and the most significant finding was that if "words and non-verbal messages [...] conflict, people believe the non-verbal every time. For example, when a spouse asks, “Are you still angry with me?” and the injured party responds 'No,' with folded arms and an angry tone, only an idiot doesn’t realize that in this case 'no' means 'yes'" (Morgan, 2016).

So if someone tells you that 93% of meaning is non-verbal, remind them that actually it is words, tone and expression. 

Nice to put this myth to bed, too. 

Sam

References:

Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent Messages. Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc.

Morgan, M. (2016, May 20). Build Real Impact: Mehrabian’s Myth – Speakers, Misinformation, Untruths. Presentation Guru. https://www.presentation-guru.com/mehrabians-myth/