If you have attended any course in communication, rhetoric and presentation techniques, you have probably heard that body language is more important than the words you say. There have even been the case that you said that words are only 7%, the voice is 38% and the body stands for the whole 55%. We have been taught to refer to Albert Mehrabian, but how many of us have actually read his original work?
Read the original: Inference of Attitudes from non-verbal communication into two channels "Albert Mehrabian and Susan R. Ferris (Journal of Consulting Psychology 1967 Vol 31, No. 3, 248-252)
study examined how much of the positive attitude you could read the body language and voice when you used - hey wait - a neutral term. There was no study on the interaction between words and non-verbal communication and the percentage 55-38-7 is discussed at the end of the document and is not derived from any experiment. The study was conducted on 17 young female students.
What we can do is look at your body, listen to the voice and words and to determine if the person is in phase with itself, congruent in what it says or credible can also call it. Especially now that there are many politicians on television in the coming months. The words say definitely more than 7%. Look at the body as well, it's fascinating easily readable credibility after a while.
