Words Matter! We’ve been wrong about one research!

Words matter. Especially when your job is to name a hurricane. Imagine you are a meteorologist, and you are about to call the storm that is about to hit Ease Coast. And it’s going to hit it hard. Would you name it Horace or Harriet? 

Think carefully, as your choice may save some lives. How come? I mean, it’s one hurricane. The selection of words will not influence its strength. It will not make it more or less deadly. Well, it may not affect the power of the storm. But it might define the death toll. 

Here’s why. As it turns out, people are not that good when assessing the danger of a hurricane objectively. Depending on the name given, they will view it as more or less harmful. So Harriet could kill more people because we assume it is less dangerous, and thus we do not prepare as much as we would for Horace. Given that some hurricanes get female names, I fear there’s some meteorologist’s evil plot.

Even if you heard otherwise (and there’s a high chance you did), words do matter. Especially that there is one research that went viral and suggested that words are not crucial when it comes to communication. This study is factual. However, most communication coaches hugely misinterpret it. They do not bother to check the actual scientific research but copy-paste the viral „research facts.” That goes for those public-speaking coaches who seek to downplay language’s importance.

The chances are you, too, have heard that only 7% of effective communication is down to language (verbal). And the rest is the tone of voice and body language (non-verbal). I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s bullshit. Next time someone states that, ask them politely to repeat their point purely with gestures. 

People who seek to downplay the importance of words cite research published in the sixties by professor Mehrabian. They focus excessively on developing body language and speaking style of confidence and charisma without paying too much attention to what is being said.

Unfortunately, this is a total misinterpretation of Mahrebian’s findings. These well-known psychologists’ experiments were mainly devoted to discovering how humans communicate and interpret emotions. The subjects were listening to the phrase „That’s nice” in an angry tone, with threatening body language or flirtatious tone and accompanying body language. 

No wonder in this scenario, words did not matter much. But the research results are not to be applied to all communication. It would be absurd.

Communicating emotions is essential. Our body language and micro-expressions influence how others perceive us. They can lead either to the halo effect or the golem effect. But the substance of your talk, your elevator pitch, and your sale’s pitch depend crucially on words. It’s the words that tell a story and the words that your audiences’ brain decode, firing up the neutrons in a specific way. Words build the idea, take us on a journey and provide a compelling call to action. Don’t you dare underestimate the power of words.

More on the misinterpretation from prof. Mehrabian himself: 

This „7%-38%-55% rule” has been overly interpreted in such a way, that some people claim that in any communication situation, the meaning of a message was being transported mostly by non-verbal cues, not by the meaning of words. 

This generalization from the initially particular conditions in his experiments is the common mistake made concerning Mehrabian’s rule. 

On his website, Mehrabian clearly states:

„Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking. Please note that this and other equations regarding the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator talks about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable. Also, see references 286 and 305 in Silent Messages – these are the sources of my findings.”