Sarcasm discovered in 1967

A few years ago I started my first corporate job. I learned a lot of new things in switching from academia. For example, it was the first time I came into contact with corporate trainers. One of the training sessions I was in was something like “communication skills”. After filling out our Myers-Briggs horoscopes and being successfully pigeonholed, we moved on to the following exciting factoid:

“Did you know that 55% of communication is body language, 38% tone of voice and only 7% the content of the words you use?”

This communication myth is pervasive in corporate circles and on the web. I was surprised to find out that these numbers were not just made up on the spot, like 83% of all statistics. Instead, they come from two articles in psychology journals:

Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S.R. (1967). Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31, 248-252.

Mehrabian, A., & Wiener, M. (1967). Decoding of inconsistent communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6, 109-114.

So could this be true? Not quite.

Mehrabian & Weiner 1967
The goal of the study was to measure the subject’s perception of the attitude of a speaker towards her listener. They recruited two female speakers and recorded them each speaking 9 words under 3 different intonational conditions:

• Liking, high evaluation, or preference


• A neutral attitude, neither liking nor disliking


• An attitude of disliking, low evaluation, or lack of preference

The 9 words were brute, dear, don’t, honey, maybe, oh, really, terrible, and thanks. The researchers divided them into three classes, those that have a positive affect, neutral affect, and negative affect.

Positive: dear, honey, thanks

Neutral: maybe, really, oh

Negative: brute, don’t, terrible

The speakers were directed to “say the words, irrespective of contents, in such a way as to convey an attitude of respectively, towards the target person” (Mehrabian & Weiner 1967).

Subjects were asked to rate what they thought the attitude of the speaker toward her listener was using a 7-point scale ranging from -3 (most negative) to +3 (most positive). One group of subjects was directed to only pay attention to the content of the words. A second group was directed to only pay attention to how the words said (the tone). And a third group was directed to pay attention to all the available information.

Not surprisingly, in the “content only” condition, people rated the speaker’s attitude according to the affect of the word. So a negative affect word like don’t was significantly more likely to be perceived as showing a negative attitude. In the “tone only” condition there was also a significant effect of tone. However, in the “use all information” condition people tended to ignore the content of the word and judge the speaker by how they said it. So a positive word like honey would be perceived as giving a negative attitude if spoken in a negative tone.

Mehrabian & Ferris 1967
This was a similar study that was intended to measure the interaction of facial expressions and tone on perception of speaker attitude. The single “neutral” word maybe was used. Three speakers said the word with three different intended attitudes towards the listener. The researchers also took photos of the three speakers as they tried to show like, dislike or neutrality. The subjects then listened to the different examples of maybe crossed with the pictures. The subjects were asked to rate the attitude of the speaker towards the listener on the same 7 point scale as in the Mehrabian & Weiner study.

Again, not surprisingly, the analysis showed significant effects of both the facial expression and tone. Mehrabian and Ferris did a regression analysis to determine the relative contributions of these two components to the total measured attitude. Here’s the formula they came up with:

AT = 1.50AF + 1.03AV

In there discussion of the results they propose to combine them with the results in the Mehrabian & Weiner study. This is when they come up with the 7%, 38%, 5% stuff:

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 coeeficients of .07, .38, and .55 respectively (page 252

Discussion
Clearly the two limited studies do not give us anything like the broad claim I heard form the corporate trainer. At best, they show that when it comes to how you are going to be perceived by someone, your tone of voice and facial expressions are important—that is, they discovered sarcasm.

To be fair, Mehrabian acknowledges the limitations on these results. See his web page:

Inconsistent communications -- the relative
importance of verbal and nonverbal messages. My findings on this topic have
received considerable attention in the literature and in the popular media.
"Silent Messages" contains a detailed discussion of my findings on inconsistent
messages of feelings and attitudes (and the relative importance of words vs.
nonverbal cues) on pages 75 to 80.
Total
Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking
Please note that this and other equations
regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from
experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e.,
like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or
attitudes, these equations are not applicable.