7 - 38 - 55!
I'm not calling a football play; those are the famous Mehrabian
numbers, giving -- in the usual citations of this research -- the
percentages that verbal content, paralinguistic features (vocal
quality, prosody, etc.), and kinesic features ("body language", broadly
construed) contribute, respectively, to the total impact of a
message. When I
last
mentioned this research, I noted that the great avalanche of
bizlore -- the lore of corporate trainers, motivational speakers,
advertising advisers, and the like -- using the Mehrabian numbers went
drastically far beyond Mehrabian's own claims, which were that these
figures applied only to the communication of attitudes and
emotions. As it turns out, the actual results of Mehrabian's 1967
studies are much more modest than even this, as Ed Keer noted
in
his blog back in February (building on
a
longer discussion by Richard Sproat on Linguist List in 2001).
Check out Keer and Sproat for details. The fact is that the 1967
studies weren't about the communication of attitudes and emotions in
general, but about the communication of one specific set of attitudes
and emotions, liking and disliking. Ok, you say, I had no earthly
idea how anyone could study the relative contributions of verbal
content, paralinguistics, and kinesics to the total impact of a message
(whatever that means), but I still don't see how this much more modest
question could be investigated experimentally: what do you measure, and
how?
Good question. What Mehrabian did was pit features (expressing
liking/disliking) in the three modes against one another to see which
mode prevailed, and how often, when they were in conflict. Even
if we accept his results at face value -- and there are many details of
the experimental design and the interpretation of the data that a
reasonable person could fret about -- all that Mehrabian did in 1967
was, in Keer's words, to discover sarcasm, in this case the conveying
by extralinguistic devices of a meaning opposite to the plain meaning
of
the words.
That's stage one. In stage two, these results morph into a global
generalization about language use, which then spreads into all sorts of
places outside the academic world. The details of this
transformation and diffusion would be worth looking at. (With
luck, Mehrabian himself has relevant materials from the 60's and
70's.) No, no, don't look to me to do this research; I'm the guy
with over a hundred postings in his queue for Language Log, and I'm not
a cultural historian.
In any case, I'd imagine that science writers for the general press,
and their editors, had a hand in the spread of the Mehrabian numbers to
a wider world. (I mention editors, because many a science writer
has had an original text altered, in small or large ways, to make it
conform to the beliefs of editors -- whatever the content of the
original. And then, famously, headlines are often attached that
seriously distort that content.)
That's stage two. In stage three, the Mehrabian numbers become
part of bizlore, indeed part of a larger set of folk beliefs.
Most people are no longer aware of the source of the numbers, and most
people who cite Mehrabian haven't looked at the original studies or any
careful summary of them; it's "common knowledge" now.
Bizlore is just one part of an enormous enterprise of popular advice
literature -- on education, child-rearing, exercise, diet,
relationships, gardening, and more, including grammar, usage, and
style. Bizlore focuses on persuasion, power, and the fostering of
positive emotions, with the aim of helping people achieve success in
business dealings of all sorts.
All sorts of popular advice literature, not just bizlore, appeal to
"common sense" and folk beliefs; rely heavily on personal opinions and
impressions (of the advisers and their audiences); and get points
across largely via particular examples, often by telling exemplary
stories of personal experience (we all love stories). Notice that
this is not at all the way scientific inquiry proceeds -- but it
IS
the way ordinary people reason about their world and their lives.
"Science" appears in popular advice literature mostly for its value as
dressing: there are numbers, real numbers; and actual researchers or
institutions, of some prominence (or apparent prominence), can be
appealed to, however spuriously. "Science" is just one more
element in the rhetoric of popular advice literature, rarely an actual
contributor to it. (There are some honorable exceptions, of
course.)
In any case, you can see why bizlore loves the Mehrabian numbers.
They're wonderfully impressive. So exact, and from a real
scientist!
The Mehrabian numbers also plug into a powerful folk belief about how
human interaction works -- that we are "communicating" (passing back
and forth) "messages" to one another. Ordinary people (and some
social scientists) conceptualize interaction in terms of the "conduit
metaphor" discussed in several places by Michael J. Reddy (most
recently, I think, in the 2nd edition (1979) of
Metaphor and Thought, edited by
Andrew Ortony) and made famous by George Lakoff in many of his
writings. Now, everyone, including social scientists as a group,
recognizes that paralinguistics and kinesics contribute a lot to the
texture of interaction, so it's natural for ordinary people to think
that linguistic expressions, paralinguistic features, and kinesic
features are just three different modes of communicating the same
messages, and it then makes sense to ask what their relative
contributions are.
Two problems, one of substance, one of method.
The first is that there's no reason to think that the three modes are
ways of conveying the
SAME "meanings", or even that
CONVEYING
meanings is what's going on. I would maintain, with many others,
that there are many different kinds of "meaning" at issue here, and
that it would be more accurate to say that the features of behavior in
question (depending on the occasion) express, reflect, perform, or
construct these meanings than to say that they simply convey them.
The second problem is that the question being posed -- what are the
relative contributions of (strictly) linguistic content,
paralinguistics, and kinesics? -- is, as I suggested above, one of
those impossibly over-global questions that almost surely can't be
answered. The methodological difficulty here is that what happens
in each of the three modes is exquisitely context-dependent. I
can't see any way to sample behavior, from the whole world of human
interactions, while controlling for these differences in context;
without such controls, what we see might well just follow from
differences in the frequencies of the various contexts, rather than
from some intrinsic difference between the modes. (There's also
the problem of individuating contexts. Where do we get an
inventory of the relevant types of context, even in one culture?)
What I'm saying here is that there are some questions about language
and behavior that are easy to formulate but so global that they are
probably unanswerable in principle. (At least some of the
questions about differences between the sexes, such as Louann
Brizendine's claim that women use many more words per day than men --
now discussed here in a long series of postings by Mark Liberman -- are
almost surely unanswerably over-global. I hope to post on that
eventually.)
A semi-final remark: linguists will probably be struck by what counts
as (strictly) linguistic (vs. paralinguistic or kinesic) in Mehrabian's
research and everything that cites it or alludes to it: apparently,
only aspects of utterances that contribute to literal meaning. To
a linguist, this is desperately impoverished view of language use,
excluding most of the subject matter of entire subfields of
linguistics. Almost all variation in the linguistic system is
ignored, thus neglecting the ways in which, through their use of
particular linguistc variants, people express, reflect, perform, and
construct social group affiliations and personas; the ways they express
or reflect attitudes and opinions towards their audiences (including
liking/disliking!), about the nature of the interaction, etc.; and the
ways in which they use linguistic choices to structure their discourses
(via discourse particles, for example). These are "social
meanings" and "discourse meanings", if you want to put everything under
the umbrella of "meaning".
Also missing is everything to do with non-literal meaning: for
instance, implicatures of all sorts, fresh figures (especially
metaphors
and metonyms), and other rhetorical devices. Emotions and
attitudes can be expressed or revealed through all these means, too.
On a more constructive note, I can remind you that linguists,
psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have long concerned
themselves with the ways in which linguistic content, choices of
variants, discourse organization, paralinguistic features, and kinesic
features are coordinated with one another and can combine into suites
of behaviors associated with "meanings" of all sorts. For a
beautiful recent example of research along (some of) these lines I
recommend Rob Podesva's Stanford Ph.D. dissertation,
Phonetic Detail in Sociolinguistic
Variation: Its Linguistic Significance and Role in the Construction of
Social Meaning, completed this summer (it will be available
eventually, in chapter-sized chunks, on his website). Podesva
looks at the way three speakers' uses of one segmental variable
(realization of word-final coronal stops) and two paralinguistic
variables (prosody and voice quality, in particular falsetto) are
associated with different personas in different contexts. These
associations are very much local, in that they are tied to particular
social groups and to particular contexts, as well as to individual
speakers (the three speakers -- all friends -- use the variables in
different ways).
(Full disclosure: I was a member of Rob's dissertation committee.)
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 13, 2006 03:38 PM