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Another of my most hated ones is the idea that only 7% of meaning comes from words (the rest from body language and tone). This doesn't even make any fucking sense, much less have any evidence that it's true. It's a terrible description (like, you'd have to be borderline-illiterate to go to the original source and have this as your takeaway) of a study that was making a completely different, much narrower point. (Specifically, that if your verbal and nonverbal communication don't match, people will generally believe the nonverbal portion - e.g. you say to your spouse "everything's fine!" in an angry, aggressive tone, this will not persuade them that everything's fine.)
Thinking for ten seconds about the last non-trivial conversation you had (roughly speaking, one where novel information was exchanged on a topic other than the participants' current emotional states) should be enough to disprove this idea decisively. How, you should ask yourself, could 93% of that information have been exchanged in a way that was independent of the words used? In most cases, you will find that the question not only does not have a good answer, but is hard to even make sense of.
This has not prevented the idea from showing up in training materials from major multinational corporations, not to mention the Web sites of universities that should damn well know better.
Yeah, if only 7% of the meaning comes from words, then this dude who has Wernicke's Aphasia is communicating just as much as a videolink of a normal conversation where 7% of the time the screen disappears and the person is muted. I find that basically impossible to believe
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Yeah, this seems absolutely impossible to believe. The information content of someone telling me, "I would like pizza for dinner" via text message is almost identical to them saying the same thing face-to-face. I might glean some additional information about their enthusiasm for said pizza in the latter case, but that's the 7% rather than the 93%. I'm not familiar with the study, but it sure seems like it's just a measurement of a claim that everyone already believes, which is that words aren't great at overriding non-verbal signals that are generally more honest when the two are contradictory.
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