Chapter 12: Nonverbal Communication
12.2 The Power of Nonverbal Communication (good and bad)
You’ve probably known about the complex relationship between nonverbal communication and words since you were a small child, if an adult played a game you could call “Don’t Give Me a Hug.” It’s extremely simple: the adult verbally tells the child not to approach and hug them, but their tone of voice, facial expression, and outstretched arms say the opposite. The child laughs and laughs, and runs up and gives them a big squeeze. It’s not only a funny game that a two-year-old grasps, but a lesson adults want to teach children: sometimes people send contradictory messages, and you need to know which channel to trust.
Those same children, when they get a little older, might recognize that the game is not always funny. If the child tells an adult some exciting news about an accomplishment (“I made you this drawing!”), and the adult says “That’s very exciting, honey” in a distracted monotone without looking away from their computer screen, the child knows the adult didn’t mean it. (Children know that if you’re truly excited about something, you have to use your legs to express it.) When they hit adolescence and report a small fender-bender, their parent may say “I’m not upset about it,” but their facial expression or tone of voice may say otherwise. This can be a form of double-bind message, a situation in which a source sends two messages simultaneously using two different channels, and the recipient can’t tell which one to believe. Double-bind messages cause anxiety and frustration, and can be a form of emotional abuse. (They are also a form of gaslighting, described Box 17.1).
Double-bind messages illustrate the good and the bad aspects of nonverbal communication: having channels of communication in addition to words allows for rich expression, nuance, and complexity, but also opens up the possibility of conflicting messages, which makes life difficult. The point about rich expression, nuance, and complexity also reinforces the value of multiple channels: if you are using only words to communicate a thought, the message will probably have little impact. Not taking advantage of other channels of communication is a wasted opportunity.
BOX 12.2: QUANTIFYING THE IMPACT OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION
Is there a way to accurately measure the impact of nonverbal cues on the interpretation of messages? Psychologist Albert Mehrabian set out to answer this question in the late 1960s. Specifically, he was interested in the contradiction question: if words don’t match tone of voice, how much weight do people put on one channel over the other? This led to the widely cited — and widely misunderstood — statistic that only 7% of meaning is conveyed through words, 38% through tone of voice, and 55% through “body language.” This became known as the 7/38/55 Rule (or sometimes the 55/38/7 Rule), but most people who cite that rule are unaware of what it means or where it came from.
In two studies, Mehrabian had one research participant, A, read cards with a single word on each, and another participant, B, rate A’s attitude toward B. To control for extraneous variables, the participants were not sitting across from each other . Instead, B was shown a photograph of A , heard a recording of the word spoken in different tones of voice, and was instructed to “imagine” what A was feeling. (Mehrabian & Ferris, 1967, p. 250). The experiment was done on only 17 subjects, all female, and the results have never been replicated.
Mehrabian notes that the scope of the study was narrow: the research was only intended to measure “liking” and only in situations where cues contradict each other. Six decades later, it is cited as a “rule” that applies to job interviews, business negotiations, public speeches, and many other contexts that reach far beyond the scope of the original experiments. Try explaining to someone how to fill out form 1120-S for S corporations filing federal taxes, or the history of mRNA vaccines, and see if facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures get you 93% of the way there. To put it simply: one should not rely on those numbers for any purpose beyond the original intent.
Mehrabian’s research also raises the question: is there a need to quantify the relative impact of nonverbal communication? Such numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, and they can lead to harmful conclusions like “You don’t really need to prepare the text of a speech as long as you have dynamic nonverbals.”
Despite all the limitations, however, the basic lesson — that nonverbal factors affect how we interpret verbal messages, and sometimes overpower the words — is a good lesson for all communicators to keep in mind.
