Ep #74 The Most Misquoted Communication Idea in the Universe!

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Have you ever sat in a seminar or a talk about communication and heard the speaker use these statistics about communication?

·       7% are the words, 

·       38% is the way the words are said (para verbals) and 

·       55% of the communication is non-verbal  (body language)

These often yet misquoted, out-of-context figures came out of the work of Albert Mehrabian, specifically, “Silent Messages.” Beginning the in 1960’s Mehrabian, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA,  has been known for his pioneering work in the field of nonverbal communication (body language). In the 1960s Professor Albert Mehrabian and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), conducted studies into human communication patterns. When their results were published in professional journals in 1967, they were widely circulated across mass media in abbreviated form. Because the figures were so easy to remember, most people forgot about what they really meant. Hence, the myth that communication is only 7 percent verbal and 93 percent non-verbal was born. And we have been suffering from it ever since.

The fact is Professor Mehrabian's research had nothing to do with giving speeches because it was based on the information that could be conveyed in a single word.

It is important to understand the context of Mehrabian findings.  At a minimum, the formula applies to communications of feelings and attitudes (like-dislike), not simple communication, ambiguity, or incongruence.

Here is the oversimplification of the true statistics:

·       7% of meaning in the words that are spoken. 

·       38% of meaning is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said). 

·       55% of meaning is in facial expression. 

Listen as Mehrabian's findings are explained, the studies that determined the findings, and the misquotations are debunked. The record is set straight!

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