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I was told the "7%-38%-55% rule" during an awful management training session on giving presentations. The instructor said that this rule is based on research th

by J-dawg 11y ago

I was told the "7%-38%-55% rule" during an awful management training session on giving presentations. The instructor said that this rule is based on research that people get only 7% of the meaning of what is being said by a speaker from the actual content, while the remaining 93% comes from body language and tone of voice. I looked around the room and couldn't believe that everyone was nodding along with this nonsense. It doesn't stand up to the slightest bit of logical scrutiny. How do you break down the "meaning" of something like a presentation into percentages? Does this mean I can stand in front of a crowd and babble complete gibberish, and providing that my tone of voice and body language are good I'll still get 93% of my point across? Anyway, I finally got around to googling where this "research" comes from. It turns out it was a (flawed) study where someone would say a single word and the listener would be asked to describe the inferred meaning [0]. Extending this idea to an entire presentation is clearly ridiculous. I guess my point is, many people seem happy to believe utter nonsense without a moment's thought, providing it gives them a clever-sounding, apparently counter-intuitive anecdote to impress their friends with. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian

derefr 11y ago
> Does this mean I can stand in front of a crowd and babble complete gibberish, and providing that my tone of voice and body language are good I'll still get 93% of my point across? Presuming a military or political speech, that sounds about right. Rousing speeches are still rousing even if you don't speak the language they're written in! The point of a lot of presentations is effectively to dump a bunch of words that move the audience's emotional state closer to the presenter's emotional state. In "emotional rhetoric", the body language and tone is primary; the words themselves are secondary, much like slides—they exist mostly to serve as a substrate for social-alliance signalling. (Imagine interactions between candidates during a presidential debate.) The words in the speech can also aid the one-in-ten audience members who are too stubborn and analytical to be swayed by anything other than the facts. Even then, though, most emotional-rhetoric speeches usually have an accompanying leaflet/programme/manifesto/whitepaper specifically for these people. A speech is almost never the proper place for the data to convince people of the soundness of the plan; instead, a speech's proper role is in making clear what emotional affect the speaker holds toward the ideas they're presenting. Which is, in a political environment, usually the most important thing to know about an idea: it's the metadata that lets you know whether the idea is really going to be tried or not, caught up in bureaucracy or not, etc.
- cafard 11y ago
  http://teachers.sduhsd.net/mgaughen/docs/Mencken.Gamalielese.pdf http://teachers.sduhsd.net/mgaughen/docs/Mencken.Gamalielese...
collyw 11y ago
Look at Trump and Palin. They talk gibberish with confidence and a certain type of charisma and people lap them up.
- cafard 11y ago
  Does either actually have charisma, or do audiences just come primed?

by J-dawg 11y ago

derefr 11y ago

> Does this mean I can stand in front of a crowd and babble complete gibberish, and providing that my tone of voice and body language are good I'll still get 93% of my point across? Presuming a military or political speech, that sounds about right. Rousing speeches are still rousing even if you don't speak the language they're written in! The point of a lot of presentations is effectively to dump a bunch of words that move the audience's emotional state closer to the presenter's emotional state. In "emotional rhetoric", the body language and tone is primary; the words themselves are secondary, much like slides—they exist mostly to serve as a substrate for social-alliance signalling. (Imagine interactions between candidates during a presidential debate.) The words in the speech can also aid the one-in-ten audience members who are too stubborn and analytical to be swayed by anything other than the facts. Even then, though, most emotional-rhetoric speeches usually have an accompanying leaflet/programme/manifesto/whitepaper specifically for these people. A speech is almost never the proper place for the data to convince people of the soundness of the plan; instead, a speech's proper role is in making clear what emotional affect the speaker holds toward the ideas they're presenting. Which is, in a political environment, usually the most important thing to know about an idea: it's the metadata that lets you know whether the idea is really going to be tried or not, caught up in bureaucracy or not, etc.

cafard 11y ago
http://teachers.sduhsd.net/mgaughen/docs/Mencken.Gamalielese.pdf http://teachers.sduhsd.net/mgaughen/docs/Mencken.Gamalielese...

collyw 11y ago

Look at Trump and Palin. They talk gibberish with confidence and a certain type of charisma and people lap them up.

cafard 11y ago
Does either actually have charisma, or do audiences just come primed?