3 September, 2008 • 2:14 pm
We all know that communication is 70% nonverbal, right?
Well, um, actually, nope. Not at all. The statistic has become mythical but is in fact urban folklore with little real support.
Thanks to Brandon for doing my homework for me regarding this post. In essence, a late 1960s study intimated that in certain situations a certain amount of communication was nonverbal, and due to masses of publicity people now waltz around hurling the “fact” that communication is 60-70% nonverbal. People have made careers out of this!
In a nutshell: 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.
Thanks Brandon. Read more about it here.
Filed under: Uncategorized
2 September, 2008 • 7:15 pm
In the past month, I’ve encountered blog postings and articles and seen/heard about presentations on the following topics:
- Email etiquette (wouldn’t information fatigue syndrome be a more interesting expansion of this?)
- Nonverbal communication (it would be interesting if someone actually publicised the fact the the whole 70%/30% statistic is a misinterpretation of the original study everyone quotes with such enthusiasm)
- Why PowerPoint is so evil (how about not bashing the software and sharing some great presentation examples?)
- Non-core business philanthropy masquerading as CSR
- The business value of employee engagement
- Cross-cultural communication tips featuring such gems as the Chevrolet Nova’s failure in Mexico
Interesting … like, 5 years ago. Flogged to death … like, 3 years ago. The Nova example is STILL USED and is celebrating its 40th birthdday in a junkyard near you.
Surely we as professional communicators have some newer insights to share than THIS?
Filed under: internal communication, organisational communication
