If I hear someone saying that communication is 55% body language, 38% tonal, and seven percent verbal, I wonder about the accuracy of everything else he or she says. We know that those percentages are not right. Dr. Albert Mehrabian himself, who did the research from which the 55/38/7 rule was mistakenly derived, says he cringes when he hears his research used erroneously. (Link to an interview of him here.)
Today I saw an interesting article about this Mehrabian myth and, in it, learned of some other research. From "Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words?" (Manitoban):
Psychologists Antonietta Trimboli and Michael Walker published a paper in the Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour in 1987, which gave another possible explanation of Merhabian’s results. They believed that the participants — who were just nice volunteers — inadvertently acted the way the experimenters had hoped — subconsciously wanting to please them. To test this hypothesis Trimboli and Walker developed an experiment to demonstrate that when the true intent of the experiment was concealed, the results indicated that the extent to which participants could discern the meaning of nonverbal communication was reduced dramatically.
In contrast to the 93 percent rule, a professor at the University of Texas, William Ickes, believes that we are most accurate at discerning what people are thinking by paying attention to their words, not their body language.
In an essay published in The Psychology of Superheroes, Ickes writes “Accuracy in this case depends heavily on understanding the particular words that other people use. [ . . . ] In effect, we learn to ‘read between the lines’ of what people actually tell us.” His research with colleague Randy Gesn, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1999, involved asking participants to try to discern what videotaped subjects were thinking and feeling by manipulating the visuals and audio of the tapes. Visual cues added very little to the participants’ accuracy for what they were thinking. However, the visual cues were slightly helpful in indicating what someone was feeling.
In contrast to the 93 percent rule, a professor at the University of Texas, William Ickes, believes that we are most accurate at discerning what people are thinking by paying attention to their words, not their body language.
In an essay published in The Psychology of Superheroes, Ickes writes “Accuracy in this case depends heavily on understanding the particular words that other people use. [ . . . ] In effect, we learn to ‘read between the lines’ of what people actually tell us.” His research with colleague Randy Gesn, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1999, involved asking participants to try to discern what videotaped subjects were thinking and feeling by manipulating the visuals and audio of the tapes. Visual cues added very little to the participants’ accuracy for what they were thinking. However, the visual cues were slightly helpful in indicating what someone was feeling.
Click to read the rest of the article.
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