Why 93% of Your Message Gets Misinterpreted

Percents Rule!  The 7%, 38%, 55% Rule

Yeah, Yeah, We All Know
We all know that it's not just the words that come out of our mouth that people use to interpret our message. We have also found out - very quickly - the same is true for "real time" written communication (i.e., texts and instant messages).  Communicating via the written word instantly is a method of information exchange less than 20 years old, but we have already made up for it with numerous acronyms and an overabundance of emoticons to pair with the written and - to an extent - meaningless words.  So, we basically brought ourselves up to the level of misconstrued phone conversations. 

Apparently, we have also lost the ability to interpret humor - at least in back and forth written conversations - because LOL (and variations thereof), haha, and a smiley faces are as ubiquitous as the messages that contain them.      

The Research Gives Us the Zen Perspective
So, what does research say about the effectiveness of what you say, how you say it, and your behavior while saying it - in combination with each other?  Professor Albert Mehrabian conducted research that led to the determination of the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages. 

In his studies, Mehrabian comes to two conclusions.

• First, that there are basically three elements in any face-to-face communication:
• (1) words, (2) tone of voice, and (3) nonverbal behavior.
• Second, the non-verbal elements are particularly important for communicating feelings and attitude, especially when they are incongruent.
• If words disagree with the tone of voice and nonverbal behavior, people tend to believe the tonality and nonverbal behavior.

The Numbers
As seen below, these elements  - for easy recall - are abbreviated as verbal, vocal, and visual, with the percentages shown. 

7% - 38% - 55% RULE
Element	Description	Proportion
Verbal	Words	7%
Vocal	Tone of voice	38%
Visual	Nonverbal behavior	55%

Accordingly, if 93% of communication is interpreted by tone and behavior, we would do ourselves a great justice if we regularly monitored the way we said things and made an effort to dissect our facial expressions and body movements to an even larger extent than we already do.  As I alluded to earlier, I am sure we all knew this was important prior to reading this, but how good are we at putting what we know into actions that makes us more influential, likeably, and persuasive?

If You Don't believe Me, Believe My Gesticulaticon
Now, pair this information with the relatively new notion of instant written communication and we may need to evolve all of our emoticons into gesticulaticons (emoticons with movement).  There certainly are signs that we are in fact moving that way, but, most likely, to be as effective as a face-to-face conversations, they would have to fake one emotion (straight faced emoticon) that - after 2 seconds - burst into laughing.

Now as you read through your Facebook news feed or posts and texts, imagine what your response might have been without the j/k or roflmgdmfao.  OK, I just found that one on the Internet Slang Dictionary and Translator. 

Dr. Mehrabian assures you that you can be 7% that I did not make this up.



I'll make your message 38% easier to understand.

Enthusiastically scribbled by, 
Jason Riemens