September 18, 2006
Today’s post is a grab bag of three interesting but unrelated items.
1. Thanks to Stephanie West Allen, who told me that the statistics I previously provided on the relative impact on communication of body language, tone of voice, words, and the pace or rate of speech are incorrect, though often cited. (See Introducing the “magic wand” for communicating: the DISC for the context and stats.)
The following excerpt from The Virtual Handshake Blog provides useful insight into how these statistics came to be so widely accepted and why they’re incorrect when applied generally:
Albert Mehrabian, a UCLA professor, completed research in 1967 showing the significance of non-verbal cues in communications. He concluded, in part, “The combined effect of simultaneous verbal, vocal and facial attitude communications is a weighted sum of their independent effects — with the coefficients of .07, .38, and .55, respectively.” (Albert Mehrabian and Susan R. Ferris, “Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels.” Journal of Consulting Psychology 31 (1967): 248-252. ) Out of context, this implies that in face-to-face conversation, 38% of communication is inflection and tone of voice, 55% is facial expression, and only 7% is based on what you actually say.
This statistic has grown into a very widely quoted and oft-misunderstood urban legend. Many communication skills teachers and image consultants misuse this data to indicate that your intonation, speaking style, body language, and other non-verbal methods of communication overpower your actual words. As a result, many people are concerned that online communication is much more difficult because body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions cannot today be effectively conveyed over the internet.
Not true. Mehrabian’s study only addressed the very narrow situation in which a listener is analyzing a speaker’s general attitude towards that listener (positive, negative, or neutral). Also, in his experiments the parties had no prior acquaintance; they had no context for their discussion. As Mehrabian himself has said explicitly, these statistics are not relevant except in the very narrow confines of a similar situation.
For more detail, see Richard Sproat, Contributions of Different Modalities to “Content”. And thanks to Nancy White for gathering this interesting research together to debunk the communications myth.
When I first heard these statistics — years ago now, in a communications training workshop — I have to admit that I wondered how they could possibly be true. But, weird-but-true facts do exist, and I accepted these stats as true after a number of reputable sources vouched for them. Now I know better. As Mark Twain is reputed to have observed, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” As he certainly noted, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”
Many thanks, Stephanie.
2. Interesting article in The American Lawyer about the use of temporary attorneys for document review. If you’ve never been on one of these assignments (and I haven’t, though I’ve certainly heard tales) you’ll find this an eye-opening article. If you have been on a document review assignment, you may want to do a lot of deep breathing as you read.
3. Very interesting blog for those interested in work/life balance issues: Up to PAR, a blog on the Project for Attorney Retention, an initiative of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. The thrust of both the blog and the project seems to be that attorney retention depends on better work/life balance programs. I particularly applaud the gender-neutral commentary, since I’ve long thought it inappropriate to cast work/life balance as an issue limited primarily to women with children.
Welcome back!
Thanks for helping continue the debunking. I think it would be interesting to do more communications research to understand how our use of technologies is changing how we “listen” these days!
You are welcome, Julie. I am glad the word is being spread about this urban legend, as Scott Allen calls it. I sent the link to your post out to several people. Nice explanation and overview.