Full Circle Associates

I've been myth-busting over the years on the Mehrabian data on non verbal cues for a number of years now. I'm always happy to see others doing the same. I don't see it quite as an urban legend as Teten's article, An urban legend: face-to-face communication is the best vehicle for communication, does. But it is a classic case of misapplication of data that has permeated assumptions for decades.

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.

I'm currently part of an online/f2f/online workshop on communities of practice in education with about 45 folks from Portugal. Most of the dialog is in Portuguese, a language I spoke fluently 30 years ago, but which is mostly buried someplace in my brain. So I work through each post (upwards of 75 a day) painstakingly with my dictionary. I was mesmerized by a thread that emerged about online body language, where we started punctuating our thoughts with text versions of our body language. One of the group said "this is becoming addictive."

The point is we can enrich our text in ways that deepens and enriches our text communition. She says, leaning in with intensity towards her new 19 inch flat panel monitor. Gee, it's nice!