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7% of what you say.....? Rubbish!
Why do people insist on passing on the idea that only 7% of the meaning of what you say is carried in the words you use? It's become something of a received wisdom to suggest that only seven percent of the meaning of what you say is contained in the words you use. As a voice & presentation skills trainer I wish it was really like that. Obviously it isn't - because if it was, I'd be able to speak French, for example, with 83% efficiency, simply by making sounds and waving my arms around! :) The mistake is that people have either misunderstood or misread the original research. (I'll leave out the possibility that they're deliberately misrepresenting it, though I as the original research is so clearly written I do have some suspicions..... Prof Mehabrian's original work was based upon the situations, such as this: a small number of people listened to recordings of people saying single word sentences. These include such things as "Maybe". Effectively, the work was trying to 'standardise out' the effect of the words themselves and look at what was left, not look at how important words were! Under such circumstances it's actually surprising that the value is as high as 7%, not as low!
I'm not saying that there's no effect of tone of voice and body-language, of course there is - but to simply cite the 7% rule without its context and without understanding it is borders on being professionally irresponsible. So why does it happen? Well, I suspect it's simply because people believe what they're told and once something like this moves into popular usage it gets used without reference to the original. Fair enough. After all, if I'm working out how far apart two points on on a map using their grid references I simply use the Pythagoras Theorem - I don't go back to the original sources.... I trust my teachers to have taught me correctly. So why did the original mistake get perpetrated? I don't know. You'd have to ask the people who originally created it. I honestly don't know who it was, but the first time I came across it was when NLP started to become popular....
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