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Description of the Study
The findings of a study on verbal and non-verbal messages in communication by Albert Mehrabian and his colleagues at UCLA in 1967 have been quoted so frequently that they are now often regarded as a self-evident truth.
In the first experiment, subjects were asked to listen to a recording of a female saying the word “maybe” in three tones of voice to convey liking, neutrality, and disliking. The subjects were then shown photos of female faces expressing the same three emotions and were asked to guess the emotions in the recorded voice and the photos. It was found that the photos received more accurate responses than the voices. In the second experiment, subjects listened to nine recorded words spoken in different tones of voice. Three words had positive meanings (e.g. honey), three were neutral (e.g. oh), and three were negative (e.g. terrible). Again, the subjects had to guess the speaker’s emotions. It was found that tone of voice carried more meaning than the individual words. From these experiments the researchers concluded that 7% of our feeling towards a speaker is based on the actual words they use, 38% on their tone of voice, and 55% on their body language (e.g. facial expression).
Methodological Issues
However, a closer look at the study reveals several limitations. The first is that the entire study involved only 62 subjects. Of these, 25 were used to select the word for the first experiment, while the key issue – comparing verbal and non-verbal communication – was determined by only the 37 remaining subjects. All were female undergraduates who participated as part of their introductory psychology course, and their ages and academic qualifications seem remarkably uniform. Thus, the findings may simply be a product of the nature of the sample.
Critics have also pointed out that the 7–38–55 formula is flawed since it was pieced together from two different experiments, neither of which involved all three channels (verbal, vocal, and facial). In addition, in the first experiment the single word “maybe” was used throughout so it was impossible for the effects of changes in verbal input to be assessed. The researchers intentionally used a “neutral” word so naturally the subjects found little meaning there. Clearly, such a methodology lacks validity. In the real world, people communicate in a particular context and speak in phrases and full-blown sentences, making extensive use of the multi-faceted vehicle of language.
