Verbal communication accounts for more than just 7%

There’s a pervasive myth that non-verbal cues account for 93% of our communications. This has been referred to as the “7% rule”.

Non-verbal signals certainly play a huge role in communication. Signals like facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures and other body language (crossing arms and leaning forward versus sitting back with relaxed posture, for example) can have a massive impact on how statements are perceived.

However, I know of no evidence which suggests that non-verbal signals account for over 90% of our total communication. The often-referenced 7% comes from misunderstood research which has been taken completely out of context.

The source of this 7% reference

In the 1960s, Professor Albert Mehrabian and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA), conducted two separate studies into human communication patterns.

In the first, subjects listened to a recording of a woman’s voice saying the word “maybe” in three different ways conveying different levels of like and dislike. They were also shown photos of the woman’s face expressing the same levels of like and dislike. One of the results was that participants guessed the correct emotion more frequently from the pictures than from the recording.

In the second study, the researchers played back groups of recorded words, three sets of three. One set expressed liking, one set expressed neutrality and one set expressed dislike. Each word was pronounced three different ways by the speaker and listeners were asked to guess which emotion the speaker was conveying. Researchers concluded that the tone of voice influenced the listeners more than the actual words themselves.

When the results from these two studies was published in professional journals in 1967, Dr. Mehrabian combined these into a single statistic: 7% of communication in these controlled experiments was verbal, 93% of the information was nonverbal, including body language (55%) and tone of voice (38%).

But these results cannot be generalized outside of this research setting. These numbers only apply when the speaker is stating just a single word related to feelings and attitudes with absolutely no other context around it.

Furthermore, these experiments were done with just 37 research subjects, all female psychology majors at the university. This sample size is also too small and not diverse enough to draw general, broadly applicable conclusions from.

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