Dealing with that whole "93% is nonverbal" issue

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Recently, some sources/people have begun to challenge that "93% of communication is nonverbal" myth. The way they challenge it seems like the way one of us Aspies would, but these challenges are coming from outside spectrum discussion boards.

The challenging statements are like, "why would there be any need to learn foreign languages" and "how do we manage on the phone" and "if I give directions to somebody in a polite manner but give him the wrong street name, how did the 93% become beneficial?"

Exactly!! Very logical statements but with a literal edge, devoid of nuance.

I think that the 67% body language, 26% tone of voice and 7% words distinction that was "all the rage" in the '90s is really just for sake of likeability or politeness. The first time I heard this was in 1997 at some sales training presentation put on by one of those BS companies that I tried to get a summer job with. The coordinator told us this % distinction, and I was skeptical simply because I never fully acknowledged or practiced it. (This was before my diagnosis.) I refuted this because I'd been able to express myself clearly using just words, but must have come off odd (monotone or stiff) to other people. But very few people actually told me that I was not lively enough or whatever - not so coincidentally about 7% of people!! - so I was basically a "victim" of the 93% distinction, as most people were conveying some distaste with my communication deficiency indirectly. (I'd always just assumed it was the problem of a few people since no-one else told me.) Talk about irony!! !

Fortunately, in the early 2000s following my dx, I was able to vastly improve this. Some of that 93% still stymies me though, because it entails contextual factors and other nonverbal cues other than body language such as the presence of certain factors or things in a place - like "try to observe what other people are wearing, or pin up at their desks, etc, etc...what message does that send about you...what can you tell about them..." etc etc. At the end of the day, I don't see this 93% as frequency of communications but rather the emphasis on an overall message, what is the true message being conveyed which overrides spoken words - I had to figure this out intellectually though as I suspect many of us on the spectrum did.

Actually those percentages are very widely misunderstood results of a university study done in 1967. There's information here: http://www.articlesbase.com/presentatio ... 43336.html

Basically, the study had nothing to do with how much of our communication is in verbal or non-verbal forms. It was about how well people could tell how someone was feeling when saying a single word based on how it sounded and how the person looked when they said it. The word itself doesn't help much, but the tone of voice and facial expression do.

Look, whatever the number is, it's damn important to neurotypicals. In fact, it's so important, it may decide our next president by the first debate, which he didn't perform that well in terms of tone, body language, etc. It is our burden to have to read, digest, and then learn how to read body language manually, as well as augment the gestures we give off, if we care to succeed in the neurotypical world we live in. There's really no other option. You can complain about it, but that won't be changing the facts or making it any bit better...