The 7% rule

I found a very interesting article that shows some research about language and two interesting and both applicable ways of how we interprete language.


The first way or point is in fact the 7% rule which seems to imply that only 7% of the actual message from the speaker is interpreted by the receiver, the other 93% is conformed of body language, the looks of the person, etc. This initiall statement is supported by two investigations that were made in 1960 by professor Mehrabian and colleagues at the university of California. This investigations was that: 


"Subjects were asked to listen to a recording of a woman's voice saying the word "maybe" three different ways to convey liking, neutrality, and disliking. They were also shown photos of the woman's face conveying the same three emotions. They were then asked to guess the emotions heard in the recorded voice, seen in the photos, and both together. The result? The subjects correctly identified the emotions 50 percent more often from the photos than from the voice."

"In the second study, subjects were asked to listen to nine recorded words, three meant to convey liking (honey, dear, thanks), three to convey neutrality (maybe, really, oh), and three to convey disliking (don't, brute, terrible). Each word was pronounced three different ways. When asked to guess the emotions being conveyed, it turned out that the subjects were more influenced by the tone of voice than by the words themselves."

From this studies, it was concluded that the rule was certainly true and that it applied to any form of spoken language, but in this article, the writer is contradicting this rule by stating further research upon this case in which he found that in scientific terms, this cannot be called a rule as only two investigations are not enough to imply this term. Also he refuted that the research had nothing to do with giving speeches, because it was based on the information that could be conveyed in a single word.

I believe that the writer has enough facts and therefore I beleive that this rule isnt true as it is absurb to think that only 7% of the message is understood by the receiver whilst 93% is conformed of trivial things such as body language and the looks of the person. Although I also learned through this TOK classes that body language can be as strong to show a message that (in some cases) words are not necessary to show a message as body language can be sufficient. So, I believe that we must always see all the perspectives from a story and therefore make an opinion from all the ways of knowing being emotions, senses, reason, language, classification, etc.

Link to article:  http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=2043156