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How we change what others think, feel, believe and do |
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Mehrabian's communication study
Explanations > Behaviors > Understanding body language > Mehrabian's communication study
There is an oft-quoted (and often mis-quoted) study by Albert Mehrabian on how people decide whether they like one another. The studiesMehrabian and his colleagues were seeking to understand the relative impact of facial expressions and spoken words. Study 1Subjects were asked to listen to a recording of a female saying the single word 'maybe' in three tones of voice to convey liking, neutrality and disliking. The subjects were then shown photos of female faces with the same three emotions and were asked to guess the emotions in the recorded voices, the photos and both in combination. The photos got more accurate responses than the voice, by a ratio of 3:2. Study 2Subjects listened to nine recorded words, three conveying liking (honey, dear and thanks), three conveying neutrality (maybe, really and oh) and three conveying disliking (don’t, brute and terrible). The words were spoken with different tonalities and subjects were asked to guess the emotions behind the words as spoken. The experiment finding was that tone carried more meaning than the individual words themselves. The misunderstandingMehrabian concluded the following formula from these studies: Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking This finding tends to be incorrectly generalized to mean that in all communications:
Of course this cannot be true: does an email only convey 7%? Can you watch a person speaking in a foreign language and understand 93%? The implicationsWhilst the exact numbers may be challenged, the important points can easily be lost in the debate about how valid or not the study was. Useful extensions to this understanding are:
We will also pay more attention to the non-verbal indicators when we trust the person less, as it is generally understood that voice tone and body language are harder to control than words. This also leads to more attention to non-verbal signals when determining whether the other person may be lying. So what?Beware of words-only communications like email. It is very easy to misunderstand what is said, even if emoticons (smileys) are used. When you feel that a person is not telling the truth, check out the alignment between words, voice and body. If you want the other person to pay more attention to your body language, be less clear with your words. If you want them to trust the words, be clear and unambiguous. See also
Mehrabian's site is at: http://www.kaaj.com/psych/
Mehrabian, Albert, and Ferris, Susan R. “Inference of Attitudes from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels,” Journal of Consulting Psychology, Vol. 31, No. 3, June 1967, pp. 248-258 Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages, Wadsworth, California: Belmont Mehrabian, A. (1972). Nonverbal communication. Aldine-Atherton, Illinois: Chicago
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