Without context, a piece of information is just a dot. It floats in your brain with a lot of other dots and doesn’t mean a damn thing. Knowledge is information-in-context… connecting the dots.
- Michael Ventura
I have recently become aware that something I thought was true, something I thought made sense, something I read in trustworthy second sources (scientists referring to another researcher’s work), something I probably mentioned in this blog, was actually fake. Not something that was thought to be true and was recently proven wrong. No. I have let other people interpret the results of a scientific study and took their interpretation for granted. Without checking the actual study, the source. I believed (and told you) that most communication was non-verbal. I believed the 7-38-55 rule to be universal.
What is the 7-38-55 rule? It is a rule that explains what channels (verbal, visual, auditory…) matter to understand the content of a communication. It states that 7% of the content of communication is verbal, 38% is 'paraverbal' (i.e., tone of voice, rhythm, volume of speech) and 55% is pure non-verbal (i.e., body language and facial expressions). And it made sense to me. I thought that in a given language, people interacting with each other would gain more information by listening to the tone of voice and looking at the body language of their interlocutors than by solely relying on the verbal content.
My mistake was that I unconsciously defined specific conditions in which this would be true, without explicitly stating those conditions. See, I’ve always been more interested in people’s emotional states than the content of their speech. It’s not that I don’t’ care about what people are telling me, it’s just that you learn more about someone by looking at their posture and listening to the tone of their voice. Two people can say exactly the same thing, it is the way there are saying it and how they behave that is going to make them interesting or not. And of course, it is only true if the 2 people communicating share a language and knowledge about each other’s cultural background.
Let’s have a look at those claims. First, you have no chance to understand the full content of a communication if you do not speak the language. Want a proof? Go online and find a foreign news channel, in a language you know nothing about (maybe Arabic, Chinese or Japanese) and “listen” to it for 5 min. After 5 min, try sum up what you understood. If the 7-38-55 rule is universally true, you should have understood over 90% of the news content. I am pretty sure that won’t be the case.
Second, you will not understand everything if you do not share at least a knowledge of your interlocutor’s cultural background. Some people shake their head left to right to say no; others do it by shaking their head up and down. Some people smile when sad, some people cry when happy. Some people see a scowling face as angry, other will see it as threatening (which could be similar but might trigger different responses). Some people look the person they are talking to in the eyes, others will avoid doing so to not appear disrespectful. Do you see where I am going? And the same is true with voice tones and rhythm. Unless you know/share the cultural background of the person you are talking to, some information will be lost in translation.
Finally, as I said before, I should have checked the source. Would have I done so, I would have known from the beginning that the 7-38-55 rule applied only to emotional communication, in the context of understanding feelings and emotions. Which is how I tended to understand this rule, but I never explicitly said so (I’m not sure my brain made the explicit connexion to start with).
To sum up, the 7-38-55 rule can only work if:
- you speak the same language as your interlocutor,
- you share knowledge of each other’s cultural background, and
- you are interested in their emotional state.
Because ultimately, that is what the 7-38-55 rule is about: understanding emotions and feelings. It is about emotional communication. Feelings and emotions will be mainly carried out non-verbally; verbal communication remains primordial for any other form of information-based exchanges.
Why am I talking about this? Well, I think it is important to admit when you realised you are wrong. I think it is important to be reminded that we need to remain critical, especially when faced with something so appealing that the 7-38-55 rule: it was so simple, so intuitive (for me), so obvious that I didn’t check the source. Don’t believe everything you hear, check the facts, ask around. Put things back into context, know where it is coming from and when it is from. And when talking with someone, always remember to take their individual context into account. Do not assume your context is theirs. Remain objective, don’t project who you are onto them. Context matters.
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