You may not recognise the name, but Albert Mehrabian authored some of the most famous studies in communications research. His most well-known hypothesis: When two people communicate face-to-face, how much of the meaning
is communicated verbally, and how much is communicated non-verbally?
First published in 1971, his research is almost a quaint idea today, considering that a lot of organisational and personal communications uses decidedly non-face-to-face methods of social media.
Despite using Twitter, Facebook, blogs to communicate (and I’m as guilty of it as anyone), there's something in Mehrabian’s research that continues to fascinate.
He concluded there are three parts to face-to-face communications – sometimes called the 3 V’s – and these three elements determine how much a receiver “likes” the speaker:
- Visual, or body and facial expressions, accounting for 55% of the liking
- Vocal, or tone of voice, accounting for 38% of the liking
- Verbal, or words, accounting for 7% of the liking
