WARNING: Someone Pushed My Button

A person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

They say, “One picture is worth a thousand words.”

I say, “In 1985, after finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple Computer Human Interface Group adopted the motto, ‘A word is worth a thousand pictures,’ and a descriptive word or phrase was added beneath all Macintosh icons. Read it for yourself in Digital Marketing: A Practical Approach by Alan Charlesworth, page 123.”

They say, “It’s been scientifically proven that 93 percent of all human communication is nonverbal.”

I say, “Show me the study. Show me who verified it. And please, for the love of God, don’t pretend to quote Dr. Albert Mehrabian because not one person who has ever quoted Mehrabian to me has ever read any of his books. Admit it. A sales trainer showed you a pie chart and said 55% of human communication is body language and 38% is tone of voice and only 7% are the words we speak.”

Pie charts are not proof.

In Mehrabian’s earliest book, Silent Messages (1971,) he speculated that during moments of extreme word/gesture contradiction, the words themselves contribute about 7 percent of the meaning we perceive, while tone of voice contributes about 38% and the rest – 55% – is body language. But Mehrabian makes it plain that these estimates pertain ONLY to moments when

(1.) a speaker is describing their feelings and emotions and

(2.) their physical gestures and tone of voice contradict their words.

When a person is holding up their middle finger as they say, “Yeah, I love you, too,” don’t trust the words; trust the finger.

In 1994, when it became obvious that sales trainers in front of white boards were grievously misquoting his 55/38/7 statement, Mehrabian said for the record “Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.”

They say, “Everything we’ve ever seen or heard is stored somewhere in our brain and under hypnosis we can remember it.”

I say, “On December 10, 2000, Matt Crenson, a science writer for the Associated Press summarized what scientists have proven in countless experiments:”

We often imagine our memories faithfully storing everything we do. But there is no mechanism in our heads that stores sensory perceptions as a permanent, unchangeable form. Instead, our minds use a complex system to convert a small percentage of what we see into nothing more than a pattern of connections between nerve cells. Researchers have learned that this system can be fooled. Ask a witness, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’ and they will name a much higher speed than if they are asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they made contact?'”

They say, “Okay, now it’s your turn to name the scientist who did the research. And please, for the love of God, don’t pretend to quote Dr. Albert Mehrabian.”

I say, “Yes, Matt Crenson failed to identify the unnamed ‘researchers’ he was quoting, but I immediately recognized the study as a Loftus & Palmer experiment reported by Dr. Alan Baddeley in his 1999 book, Essentials of Human Memory. In that experiment, groups of people were asked to watch the video of a collision between two automobiles. Viewers who were asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’ gave answers averaging 40.8 MPH and reported having seen broken glass. But the group who was asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they made contact?’ reported speeds averaging only 31.8 MPH and remembered no broken glass, even though both groups had just watched the same video.”

They say, “But it’s been proven that we remember more of what we see than what we hear.”

I say, “Would you be willing to trust the opinion of Professor Steven Pinker whose research on vision, language, and social relations was awarded prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association? Would you believe Pinker? He’s also received eight honorary doctorates, won several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard as well as numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. Prospect magazine listed Pinker among ‘The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,’ Foreign Policy named him in their ‘100 Global Thinkers,’ and Time magazine put him on their list of ‘The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.’ Would you be willing to trust the opinion of Steven Pinker?”

They say, “I don’t care what he says and I don’t care what you say, either. I’ve seen the pie charts. I know what I believe. “

I say, “Yeah, I love you, too.”

Roy H. Williams