Non Verbal cues are not important

   Last week, one of my friends at Chennai Speakers Forum Toastmasters presented her speech. I liked the confidence, the free flow of ideas, and the statistical tidbits of her speech.While she expounded on the various aspects on presenting an ‘Effective Presentation’, I was wondering about the numbers in her speech. 

           Your words 7%

               Your tone of voice 38%

               Your body language 55%

   She quoted researches confirming a popular phenomenon. Research says that for any speech or conversation or discussion, the meaning of the message is carried more by voice and body language than by the actual spoken words.

  For anyone who has been part of any communication group, this is not a news. That your body language and vocal variety is much more important than the content of your speech is an often repeated mantra. All along I had no qualms, but when presented in terms of numbers, it looked almost unbelievable, I wondered why words carried only 7% while we spend more than 70 % of the time writing those words for the speech. Is that even possible?

  How can someone explain such disparity? Though I agree that I’m much more impressed by Obama’s enthusiastic animated speech than Manmohan Singh’s dull recitation, I had difficulty in agreeing to the sheer insignificance assigned to words in a speech. The content may not be the king when it comes to a speech, but it is no worse than the soldier who faces the enemies up front with courage. 

  What was this research that gave such accurate numbers? How did they measure this? Thanks to the internet, my research was not as cumbersome as the research under question.

 Who did this research? Albert Mehrabian came up with this research in the late ‘60s, but there are few important points to note before confirming the direct implication of his research to a speech. Through a trail of search, I finally ended up at this site.

--Start of Excerpt^*--

The studies

Mehrabian and his colleagues were seeking to understand the relative impact of facial expressions and spoken words.

Study 1

In Mehrabian and Wiener, (1967), subjects listened to nine recorded words, three conveying liking (honey, dear and thanks), three conveying neutrality (maybe, really and oh) and three conveying disliking (don’t, brute and terrible).

The words were spoken with different tonalities and subjects were asked to guess the emotions behind the words as spoken. The experiment finding was that tone carried more meaning than the individual words themselves.

Study 2

In Mehrabian and Ferris (1967), subjects were asked to listen to a recording of a female saying the single word 'maybe' in three tones of voice to convey liking, neutrality and disliking.

The subjects were then shown photos of female faces with the same three emotions and were asked to guess the emotions in the recorded voices, the photos and both in combination.

The photos got more accurate responses than the voice, by a ratio of 3:2.

They cautiously note:

These findings regarding the relative contribution of the tonal component of a verbal message can be safely extended only to communication situations in which no additional information about the communicator-addressee relationship is available.

--End of Excerpt--

 Let us analyse his experiments with a speech in mind?

1) Mehrabian arrived at the ratio 7:38:55 through two independent experiments.
2) Mehrabian used only words, not a speech, not even a complete sentence for conducting this experiment.

  Can combing results of two complex experiments on human behavior sufficient to arrive at such a conclusion? Mehrabian’s disclaimers are proof enough to confirm that we cannot draw an accurate parallel from his research to any meaningful discussion between two human beings. If that is not enough, the research was done only using words, not complete meaningful sentences. 

   His research was probably tweaked by innovative coaches from speech training companies with honorable intentions; to stress the importance of voice and body language in speech. Or is it a clever marketing strategy to lure potential client to their company? With time more people accepted the misinterpretation of his theory? Why? Because any surprising statistic or fact tend to have high impact and better recall value. It has almost become the opening line of many presentation trainings, and as more people joined the bandwagon of 7:38:55, the misintrepreted theory has developed a credibility that will be very hard to break.  

   Of course, there is no denying the importance of voice and body language in any communication situation. They are as important as the words. But for a complete speech, a ratio of 33:33:34 makes much more sense than Mehrabian’s 7:38:55. Words cannot stand alone all the time, Mehrabian's research in itself is a perfect testimony to this fact.

  All this reminds of a Siddhuism, “Statistics are like miniskirts, they reveal more than what they hide.”After all Obama owes as much as to his catch phrase “Yes we can” to all the emotions he showed while making that historic speech. The title may be slightly misleading, but I know you wouldn't read if not for such controversial title. It is not too far away from the central idea of this article ; Non verbal cues are not as important as you thought them to be.

^*Excerpt on Mehrabian’s study: http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/body_language/mehrabian.htm