I was told the &quot;7%-38%-55% rule&quot; during an awful management training session on giving presentations. The instructor said that this rule is based on research that people get only 7% of the meaning of what is being said by a speaker from the actual content, while the remaining 93% comes from body language and tone of voice.
I looked around the room and couldn&#x27;t believe that everyone was nodding along with this nonsense. It doesn&#x27;t stand up to the slightest bit of logical scrutiny. How do you break down the &quot;meaning&quot; of something like a presentation into percentages? Does this mean I can stand in front of a crowd and babble complete gibberish, and providing that my tone of voice and body language are good I&#x27;ll still get 93% of my point across?
Anyway, I finally got around to googling where this &quot;research&quot; comes from. It turns out it was a (flawed) study where someone would say a <i>single word</i> and the listener would be asked to describe the inferred meaning [0]. Extending this idea to an entire presentation is clearly ridiculous.<p>I guess my point is, many people seem happy to believe utter nonsense without a moment&#x27;s thought, providing it gives them a clever-sounding, apparently counter-intuitive anecdote to impress their friends with.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Albert_Mehrabian" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Albert_Mehrabian</a>