7% - 38% - 55%

How many of you know the significance of these three percentages?

Anyone who has ever attended a seminar or course on presentation skills has undoubtedly heard them. When communicating, we are told, only 7% of our message is communicated through the words we use… 38% is communicated through vocal tone… and a whopping 55% is communicated through facial expression.

I was thinking about this during a trip I took this spring to Prague in the Czech Republic. Czech is a very difficult language to learn (for me anyway). But according to the 7-38-55 theory, I really shouldn’t need to learn Czech at all…. I should be able to understand 93% of a Czech conversation through tone and facial expressions alone. Suffice it to say, the 7-38-55 concept did not work for me that well. Without understanding the words I was pretty clueless!

So what exactly is going on here? Where do these percentages come from?

Albert Mehrabian, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA. In 1967 Mehrabian conducted a pair of studies with some colleagues. The first study, “Decoding of Inconsistent Communications” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The second was called “Inference of Attitudes from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels” and was published in the Journal of Consulting Psychology. Together, these two small studies are the origin of the 7-38-55 percentages which are used exstensively in presentation skills coaching.

Study Design
Several individuals have done a good job of summarizing these studies. One of them is Richard Sproat from AT&T Labs. Rather than re-write this information I am copying some of Richard Sproat’s comments for this record. His entire article can be found here.

In the first study, Mehrabian and Wiener, looked at the perception, by subjects, of the attitude of a speaker towards her listener. The experiment used stimuli recorded from two female speakers, who read each of nine words under three different intonational conditions. The nine words were divided into three groups, three conveying positive affect — “honey”, “thanks” and “dear”; three conveying neutral affect — “maybe”, “really” and “oh”; and three conveying negative affect — “don’t”, “brute” and “terrible”.

The two speakers were then asked to imagine that they were speaking to someone, using each of the nine words in turn, and then “to say the words, irrespective of contents, in such a way as to convey an attitude of liking, high evaluation, or preference; a neutral attitude, that is neither liking nor disliking; and an attitude of disliking, low evaluation, or lack of preference, respectively, towards the target person”. There was no control of how the two speakers implemented these attitudes.

Three groups of subjects then listened to the stimuli, and were asked to rate the degree of positive attitude of the speaker towards her listener on a scale from -3 (most negative) to +3. The three groups were given different instructions, either: attend to only the content (of the words); attend to only the tone; or attend to all information available.

The second study was similar, but this time focused on the interaction of facial expressions and tone. Again, this description comes from Richard Sproat.

Here a single neutral word was selected by a group of subjects: “maybe”. Three speakers were then instructed to say this word with three different intended attitudes towards their listener, as in the previous experiment. Photographs of the faces of three female models were taken as they attempted to convey like, neutrality or dislike towards a hypothetical addressee. Subjects then listened to the various renditions of the word maybe, crossed with the various pictures, and were asked to rate the attitude of the (hypothetical) speaker towards her addressee, again on a scale from -3 to +3.

Results
The first study found that when subjects used both the vocal tone and the content to discern the speaker’s attitude, they relied more on tone than content.

In the second study, significant effects of both facial expression and tone were found when subjects attempted to judge the attitude of the hypothetical speakers. In the discussion of this second study, Mehrabian proposes that the results of the two studies can be combined. He also goes on to propose (but does not prove) that:

It is suggested that 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.

Discussion
At the heart of the 7-38-55 myth is a kernel of truth. As with much of the information presented so far in the Presentation Facts series, this kernel has been expanded, projected and generalized far beyond its original scope.

Mehrabian’s studies relate to a highly controlled environment where the subjects were attempting to interpret only the attitude of the speaker from very limited information. The study did not address the transfer of content at all.

To say based on this study that people get only 7% of their communication from the words they hear is just wrong. As with my learning Czech example, this doesn’t even correlate with our own life experiences. There is no evidence whatsoever in these studies to support the way most people use these numbers, and any presentation coach or Presentation Professional using these percentages in this way should stop doing so.

Presentation Fact: As far as we know, the words still matter.

Posted by Robert Befus in Presentation Facts