Body Language

In a recent TV program, Secrets of Body Language, on the esteemed History Channel, the narrator spoke of the when describing Yasser Arafat's obsequious back-patting and attempts to defer to his colleague as a sign of "apparent geniality."

"We pay so much attention to the words people speak; but remember, 93% of human communication is delivered through body language."

I posted that quote (of an experiment conducted by Albert Mehrabian in the 1960s and widely misinterpreted), onto LinkedIn, and started a firestorm, with people coming out of the woodwork eschewing that quote as outdated, a "myth," long ago refuted by other so-called experts.  The problem is not the quote, so much as the ongoing misinterpretation of the masses, even experts. Wikipedia has a great write-up about Mehrabian and the experiment in question that is worth reading.

In short, the experiment attempted to examine the elements of communication, including verbal, as well as non-verbal elements.  Mehrabian concluded that there are three basic elements in all face-to-face communication:

• Words
• Tone of voice
• Nonverbal behavior, such as facial expressions.

Note, importantly, that the experiment is very narrow in focus; moreover, the experiment was for face-to-face communication.  Surely, not all communication is conducted face to face, which adds another dimension to examining communication in general.  Nonetheless, in every respect, these experiments in communication assume human communication - we all know, of course, that communication occurs between and among species, but that's another story.