The 7-38-55 Rule: What Mehrabian Really Said About Communication
There’s a statistic I’ve heard repeated in communication training rooms for years: only 7% of communication comes from the words we use, while 38% comes from our tone of voice and a whopping 55% from our body language.
Or, as it’s often presented, 93% of communication is non-verbal.
It’s a great statistic for a trainer. It’s memorable, it makes people sit up and pay attention, and it gives you a very easy way into a conversation about the importance of delivery.
The trouble is, it isn’t true. Or, more accurately, that isn’t what Albert Mehrabian’s research found.
And if we’re going to stand in front of a room and teach other people how to communicate, I think we have a responsibility to understand the evidence behind the things we tell them.
So what did Mehrabian actually find?
Albert Mehrabian’s research at UCLA explored how we communicate feelings and attitudes, particularly what happens when the signals we’re giving someone don’t match.
His famous 7-38-55 figures emerged from experiments involving inconsistencies between words, tone and facial expression, and that context is rather important. The research wasn’t looking at how much meaning we get from the words, voice and body language in every conversation we have, and it certainly wasn’t suggesting that only 7% of what you say matters.
Yet that’s the version that has somehow made its way into countless communication and presentation skills workshops.
And it doesn’t take much thought to see the problem with it. If words only account for 7% of communication, I should be able to understand almost everything somebody tells me in German, Mandarin or Arabic, despite speaking none of those languages. I can’t.
Equally, if I’m preparing a CEO to explain disappointing financial results, a technical expert to make a complex subject understandable or a spokesperson to answer difficult questions about a crisis, I’m certainly not going to tell them that the words they choose account for just 7% of the job.
What they say matters enormously.
But I’m not letting body language and delivery off the hook
This is where I think the conversation becomes much more useful, because I absolutely do pay attention to how somebody communicates as well as what they say.
I notice when their pace makes it difficult to keep up with them, when their body language starts distracting me from what they’re saying, when the energy disappears at exactly the point I want them to sound enthusiastic, or when their tone of voice doesn’t quite match the message they’re trying to communicate.
Quite often, the person doing it has absolutely no idea.
And that’s one of the reasons training can be so valuable. You get the opportunity to see and hear yourself through somebody else’s eyes and ears, and to work out whether the impression you’re creating is the one you intended.
So I’m certainly not arguing that the non-verbal elements of communication don’t matter. Far from it. I just don’t need a misquoted statistic to prove that they do.
I’d rather maximise the 7%
There’s another phrase I’ve encountered in communication training over the years: ‘neutralise the 93%’.
I’ve never particularly liked it. I’d much rather maximise the 7%.
Again, I’m not suggesting for a moment that the percentages themselves are accurate. What I like is the idea of putting much more emphasis on making our words work harder.
I spend a lot of time helping people think about what their audience actually needs from them, what they want people to understand and remember, and why anyone should care in the first place. We look at whether they can get to the point sooner, make something complicated easier to understand and use language that sounds as though it genuinely belongs to them.
Then we look at how they deliver those words, because the two have to work together. A brilliant message can be lost through poor delivery, just as confident body language and a polished voice won’t rescue an answer that says very little.
This matters when you become the trainer
There’s a reason I wanted to write about Mehrabian on The Media Trainer Method website.
When you start training other people, it can be very tempting to inherit what other trainers do. You see a statistic on a slide, hear a useful-sounding rule in a workshop or find an exercise that everybody seems to use, and before long it becomes part of your own training.
I think we need to be a little more curious than that.
We need to understand why we’re teaching something, what the research actually says and whether it really applies to the situation in front of us. Most importantly, we need to ask whether it’s genuinely going to help the person sitting in front of us become a better communicator.
You don’t need to turn your training room into a university lecture. I certainly don’t. But you do need to know why the things you teach deserve their place in your workshop, particularly when you’re asking experienced professionals to trust your expertise.
That, for me, is part of becoming a credible trainer.
And Mehrabian certainly isn’t the only communication ‘truth’ worth taking another look at, so I have a feeling this may become a series.
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