what we say is as important as how it’s said. I have probably fallen for the repeated lie about how only ten percent of what we say is important.
So, my first question is whether any Dopers know about this or have an answer to it.
My second question is whether or not it does apply when the speakers all know the same language natively. In other words, can we do sarcasm without tone and body language?
Didn’t we have a thread recently about how sincere statements were misinterpreted as sarcastic? The evidence suggests that sarcasm can’t be detected though pure text reliably, although apparently some people can’t do it with non-verbal hints present, either.
About that article:
“93% of the information communicated in face-to-face meetings is non-verbal”
Yeah right. They used to say 90% but apparently the verbal part has shrunk another 30% to a mere 7%. In English, we speak about 150 words per minute with 5 characters per word and about one bit of entropy per character, so verbal communication has an information density of about 12.5 bits per second.
So now show me how to transfer the other 178.5 bits per second non-verbally.
In other words, the abundance of non-verbal information is complete nonsense. (That is not to say that non-verbal communication doesn’t exist or isn’t important, just that it doesn’t convey very much actual information.) And no, I didn’t read any further than that sentence.
To be clear, the article is saying the 90% non verbal is NOT true and that it’s more 50/50 or so. However, I’m not sure that’s the case among native speakers of the same language.
Or maybe I’m conflating my own experiences with friends, many I’ve known decades, and we can communicate with very few words.
The catch is that different sorts of information are conveyed verbally and nonverbally, and the sort of information that’s conveyed nonverbally can be extremely important. Messages like “I want to kill you”, or “I want to have sex with you” are often conveyed nonverbally, and you really wouldn’t want to miss either of those messages.
But can we put a percentage to them? What I keep hearing is 90% is non verbal but the article seemed to claim 55% was non verbal. Is that reasonable? Does anyone know? I find it equally interesting that tone was only 7%. So we must listen to them, check body language and use tone if we aren’t clear?
You can, but it will be purely subjective, depending entirely on how you quantify information. iljitsch shows that digital information can be quantified (digital info includes words, letters, and digital imagery for example), but non-verbal information is analog; you’d have to figure out what the messages are and then quantify them before you could assess percentages.
What I’m reading is that non verbals are somewhere between 50-90% of the communication. Context is important as to where it is but it doesn’t seem to be less than 50%.
Is that fair to say?
Flywheel: Hopefully the confusion is gone? If not, where are you confused? And if it’s me, sorry.
If verbal communication provides only 10-50% of the data, then literature and poetry must be highly overrated.
Non-verbal comm is clearly important, but the percentage of meaning it conveys must surely vary a lot from instance to instance. Communication can be entirely non-verbal, as when you communicate your rage/hatred/frustratoin with violence or angry stares, or when you communicate your love with sensuous touching. Or it can be entirely verbal, as with a love letter.
Information conveyed in communication is most easily counted in bits. (Converting analog to digital is trivial and left as an exercise for the reader.)
How many things can we communicate non-verbally? Even if we ignore reliability (givers of signals tend to overestimate their clarity), surely it can’t be more than a few dozen. Any attempt at quantifying this information comes up hopelessly short to support those insane claims that it adds up to 93 or 90 or 50 % of communication.
Maybe it conveys a high percentage of the impact of communication, but there’s just not much information there.
This is something that is very difficult to measure and is going to depend on the circumstances. If I’m telling someone how much lumber I need to order for a job, there is no non-verbal information that is needed: “I need 16 2x4s at 8 ft each and 10 2x6s at 10 ft each. All DF”
But if you’re sitting there gossiping with someone, there is probably all sorts of non-verbal information that is passed along.
I can’t tell if anyone read the article or not. The article is about catching a liar when they are lying. The first thing it talks about is how the oft quoted myth is that what a person says only accounts for ten percent of the communication that is happening. It then brings up the fact that if non verbals were that important, there would be no reason to learn a foreign language, which could be extended to Matching Elf’s poetry and literature example.
It’s about matching up body language with what a person says to find the incongruities, which could be the lies.
It’s not talking about putting in an order for lumber, unless the person asking for lumber is also holding up four fingers but saying they want eight 2x4s. Then it’s asking, which do we value more, the eight that they said or the four that they are indicating with their fingers?
It’s not about gossip, either, unless they are taking the gossip seriously and one person might be lying for some reason.
I don’t think I have been clear, either, for which I apologize. Years ago, Eddie Izzard did a routine where he talked about the “bad data” of how it’s “seventy percent how you look, twenty percent how you say it and only ten percent of what you say”. As I think about the responses and where I was coming from, I realize that even then, Mr. Izzard was probably specifically talking about giving a speech, in order to sway a crowd or opinion.
So here are my follow up questions. Are non verbals, specifically how you look and how you say it, more important in a (political) speech or a speech to sway an opinion? How did you react to the first half of my reply?
There’s the famous case of Nixon where people were convinced by him after hearing him on the radio but not when seen on TV so yes, the way you look (or sweat) matters a great deal. But more important than what?
In general, you’d want the verbal and non-verbal communication to match to be effective. If they don’t match, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lying. Usually people can’t suppress all outward signs of emotion, but good luck figuring out what that emotion means. Could be that they’re lying, could be that they’re afraid someone thinks they’re lying, or angry that someone is implying they’re lying.
