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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Why is podcasting so successful if 93 percent of communication is nonverbal?

This post on podcasting for e-learning professionals will consider some aspects of narrative, and debunk an urban myth.

The term pace has already entered this series of E-Learning Curve Blog articles about creating podcasts. In this post I will discuss pace, and then the related concepts of pitch, projection, and pausing, over the next few days.

Now read on...

Famously, there are three major elements in human face-to-face communication: body language, voice tonality, and words. According to Mehrabian and Ferris (1967, pp.248-52)

  • 55% of impact is determined by body language - facial expressions, eye contact, body posture, gesture
  • 38% by tone of voice
  • 7% by the content or the words used in the communication process

Anyone who has ever taken a course on presenting will have heard the instructor assert the axiomatic 55-38-7 formula to their learners as if it were inviolable, like fundamental physical constants like 0 Kelvin, c, or that TOS is better than TNG*.

David Lapakko (1997) asserts that this formula for communication is part of the "catechism" (p.63) of linguistics, proxemics, and psychology.

And that there is good empirical evidence that it is wrong.

According to Lapakko,

A closer look at the Mehrabian and Ferris (1967) study reveals severe limitations that call for prudence in interpreting their results... the findings may be an artifact of [a] small sample size.

(p.64)

His views are supported by other researchers' findings, including Burgooon, Buller and Woodall (1998), and Hegstrom (1979). Burgoon et al consider that:

[The 55-38-7 estimate] is erroneous. It is based on extrapolation of two studies, one comparing vocal tone to facial cues... and one comparing vocal tone to single words... rather than comparing all three.

(p.155)

Hegstrom agrees that:

The formula was pieced together from two different studies.

(p.135)

Indeed, Mehrabian himself believes that his findings are "often misquoted." In Intercultural encounters: The fundamentals of intercultural communication (1995) he wrote that :

...all my findings ...dealt with communications of feelings and attitudes...Clearly it is absurd to imply or suggest that the verbal portion of all communication constitutes only 7% of the message.

The refutation of the 55-38-7 formula is great news for podcasters in general and e-learning professionals in particular, because of course it means that we're not operating in some notional margin of communication, but in its mainstream, as anyone who has ever created a podcast (or even used a telephone) to communicate meaningful information already knows.

In a sense, content delivery works independently of content; some people, as the saying goes, can make the phone book sound interesting. For those of us without this gift, we have to consider how to maintain interest and engage the audience. One of the ways we do this is to pace the dialog appropriately. I would assert that a narrative must be kept moving at a fairly brisk rate. The secret of pace is:

Allow enough time to each learning point for it to be well understood. Then move on.

Pace is impossible without intelligibility. Conversely, it depends in part by not going too fast. Pace depends on the precise shaping of the meaning and the words in time, and it provides the foundation upon which everything else is built.

When a podcast has a lack of pace, it is often down to another, subtler fault: a lack of organization in the underlying form of a podcast's content. In the design of almost any good podcast, there should be a series of basic units of information, each occupying a few minutes. Each of these should contain one major learning point and sufficient supporting detail to help establish it as clearly as possible. The format of the podcast should provide light and shade within a piece, allow details to emerge, and a story to develop.

Certain types of verbal and linguistic construction don't work in podcasts: they contain too much content, too little time, or both. For example, the cold, clear logic of a computer language like Java, or a turgid mass of detail are both death to clear, intelligible verbal constructions in sound.

With that in mind, here is the latest episode from my ‘Other’ Podcast - Transatlantic: the Flying Boats of Foynes (’New and Notable’ according to the iTunes Podcast Store). If you choose to listen to the podcast, you’ll notice that the piece is not merely a narrator telling a story: along with narration, there’s dramatization, eye-witness accounts, and incidental and background music. Other sound elements included in the series of podcasts include archive recordings, wild track, and a very cool sound collage to set the scene for the outbreak of World War 2 in September 1939.

In Part 4 of Transatlantic: The Flying Boats of Foynes

It's 1939. 314_podcastcover4_300

In Ireland, the town of Foynes in County Limerick becomes a boomtown because of its airport, and a tourist attraction because of the flying boats. The ground staff of Pan Am, and BOAC became part of the community, and the various Irish, British, and American communities live, work and play together.

But in Europe, events leading to the greatest conflict of the 20th Century are beginning to move apace as Fascism rises in Europe.

Autocratic single-party regimes in Germany and Italy have become totalitarian dictatorships. As their military might grows, their leaders lay their plans against the nations of the West...

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Click here to view the transcript of this podcast (PDF, 26K).

The observant among you will notice that the piece isn’t about e-learning. That’s OK – the point of e-learning is to provide training professionals with a means of creating and distributing content that enables people to acquire information, knowledge, skills, and expertise on a diverse range of subjects: as e-learning practitioners, it’s our job to facilitate this process.

More…

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*Humorous Remark Alert! No Trekkie flames please; we all know that Picard is a better captain than Kirk...

__________

References:

Burgoon, J. K., Buller, D. B., & Woodall, W. G. (1989). Nonverbal communication: The unspoken dialogue. New York: HarperCollins/Greyden Press

Hegstrom, T. (1979). Message Impact: What percentage is nonverbal? The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 43, 134-142.

Lapakko, D. (1997) Three Cheers for Language: A Closer Examination of a Widely Cited Study of Nonverbal Communication. Communication Education, 46. [Internet] Available from: http://resourcemagazine.co.uk/acatalog/lapakko.pdf Accessed 31 July 2009

Mehrabian, A. (1995). Intercultural encounters: The fundamentals of intercultural communication (3rd ed.). Englewood, CO: Morton Publishing Company.

Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S. (1967). Inference of Attitude from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels. The Journal of Counselling Psychology, 31.

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2 comments:

David Lapakko said...

Michael--
Thanks for mentioning my article on the Mehrabian research. In case you're interested, I did a follow-up piece in our state communication journal (Journal of the Communication & Theater Association of Minnesota, 2007) that looks at how pervasive this misunderstanding has become--the 7-38-55 "formula" is now the equivalent of an "urban legend," and I think that's unfortunate.

Michael Hanley said...

Thanks for getting in touch David,
My pleasure; being in learning and development for about 10 years, I've encountered this myth many times, especially among my classroom-based colleagues. I guess that the attraction of simple assertions like the 7-38-55 "formula" is that they seem to encapsulate a "nugget of wisdom" despite the fact they may be empirically unsound (as in this case).
It's important to question orthodoxies, if for no other reason to than to prove it - or to demonstrate their invalidity, as you have done.
I'll certainly read your follow-up piece and if you don't mind may cite it in a future post on this topic.
Thanks and best regards,
Michael
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