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You often hear statements like "90% of our communication is non-verbal", though the percentage tends to vary. What exactly do these statements mean? How can you quantify communication? Surely, non-verbal communication can't communicate 90% of abstract concepts or information. So what is communication? Do claims that most of communication is non-verbal make any real sense, or are these just cliché statements?
Accepted:
March 23, 2011

Comments

Andrew Pessin
March 24, 2011 (changed March 24, 2011) Permalink

Interesting question! Would be nice to look at specific examples of people making such claims, and then analyzing them; one suspects that such phrases are mostly rhetorical, ie dramatic ways of saying 'we communicate a LOT non-verbally', but it's not impossible that some might intend something more empirical, precise, quantifiable by them. After all, we say things like "a picture's worth a thousand words", because we realize that we must often utter many, many propositions to describe everything that is contained in, or communicated by, some image -- so why shouldn't something similar be true re "non-verbal communication", which would include everything from facial expressions to tone of voice to body language to general behavior etc .... Perhaps you could (perhaps some have!) actually studied (say) actual conversations between people and then (roughly) measured what was communicated strictly verbally (ie just which/how many propositions were uttered by the people speaking) and then studied how much information was transmitted non-verbally (by literally trying to express that infromation in propositions) ... If you study some of the classic work on "speech acts" by philosophers such as John Searle (he has a book and numerous articles on the subject), you'll discover careful analysis that shows how, by uttering a single proposition in the right context much MORE can get communicated than what is actually said .... So, again, while one must be skeptical of specific numbers ("90%"), it doesn't strike me as purely non-sensical or meaningless to believe that "much" or "much more" of our communication is non-verbal than explicitly verbal ....

hopethat helps!
ap

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