In Other Words… what magicians and Mehrabian both knew about words and actions — and what politicians and practitioners dismiss at their cost

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Four groups, one principle

A magician holds a theatre audience in the palm of their hand, making the impossible appear to happen in plain sight. A politician steps up to a podium and makes a promise the public will remember long after the cameras have gone. A corporate leader announces a new direction to a workforce that has heard it before. A social worker tells a family they will follow something up. What connects all four is the same underlying principle: the people on the receiving end are not simply processing the words. Their nervous systems are tracking whether what is said and what is done align — and they are doing it automatically, below conscious thought, with a reliability that no amount of confident delivery can override. This piece looks at where that principle comes from, what research has established about it, and what happens when it is ignored.

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A statistic that travelled further than it should have

There is a statistic that appears constantly in communication training, therapy courses, business coaching, and popular psychology: communication is 7% words, 38% tone of voice, 55% body language. The shorthand version is that communication is “93% nonverbal.”

The numbers come from research by Albert Mehrabian, a psychologist who conducted studies in the late 1960s. The research was real. The findings were genuine. But somewhere between the laboratory and the training manual, something important got left behind — namely, what Mehrabian actually studied, and the explicit warning he attached to his findings about what they should not be used to claim. The full Beyond Words essay on this platform covers the research in detail. This piece covers the same ground in plainer language.

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What the study actually did — and what it did not

Mehrabian’s research was specifically about how people judge feelings and attitudes when different communication channels contradict each other. Participants heard single words — words like “maybe” or “really” — recorded with different emotional tones, whilst simultaneously viewing photographs of facial expressions. The researchers measured which channel most influenced the participant’s judgement about whether the speaker felt positively or negatively toward them. In that specific setup, the famous percentages emerged.

No sentences. No conversations. No shared history. No moving faces — just still photographs. And the study was deliberately constructed so that the channels contradicted each other, because contradiction was the thing being measured. Mehrabian stated explicitly that his findings applied to communication of feelings and attitudes in situations of contradiction between channels, and should not be generalised to communication as a whole. That qualification did not travel with the numbers.

The misapplication is easy to test. A telephone call involves no visible body language at all, yet people negotiate contracts, conduct therapy, and maintain friendships over the phone without difficulty. If body language genuinely accounted for 55% of all communication, telephone conversation would be nearly useless. It is not. The “7–38–55” formula was never a map of all human communication — it described one narrow laboratory finding about how people resolve contradictions between channels.

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What the research actually found — and what later work confirmed

Strip away the misapplication and there is a genuine insight. When channels send contradictory signals — words saying one thing while tone and expression suggest another — people tend to trust the channels that are harder to consciously control. Words can be chosen carefully; a person can deploy reassuring language even when they feel nothing of the kind. Tone and facial expression are less manageable. They reflect internal states more automatically, and when they conflict with words, they tend to reveal what the words are working to conceal. A technically correct apology delivered with a dismissive tone does not land as an apology. Reassurance that contradicts everything a person’s body is communicating does not reassure.

Contemporary research, including a major 2023 review by Miles Patterson and colleagues, adds the fuller picture. Verbal and nonverbal communication operate through different systems, evolved for different purposes, running simultaneously rather than competing for percentage shares of a fixed total. Nonverbal channels — tone, posture, expression, proximity — run continuously, carrying emotional and relational information whether or not anyone is intentionally broadcasting it. Verbal communication operates in discrete units and carries the precision and complexity that nonverbal channels cannot achieve alone. When the two align, communication feels clear. When they conflict, the nonverbal tends to win — not because it always matters more, but because it is harder to fake. That is what Mehrabian identified. The mistake was turning a specific conflict-resolution finding into a general claim about all communication.

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What the limbic system is actually tracking

Professional magicians and illusionists understand this principle with unusual precision. Their craft depends on managing exactly what the audience’s limbic system receives — coordinating clear actions, carefully framed words, and rapport with the audience to make the impossible appear to happen. The audience’s rational mind knows it is being deceived; the limbic system responds to the orchestrated sensory experience anyway. What makes the illusion work is not the words the magician speaks — it is the seamless alignment between what the words suggest and what the hands, eyes, and presence confirm. The audience actively seeks out the experience, willing participants in the suspension of disbelief, precisely because the performer has mastered the channel management that most people leave to chance.

The opposite failure is equally instructive. Corporate and political leaders who make public announcements — promises of change, commitments to their people, declarations of intent — and then do not follow through are not simply failing to keep their word. They are communicating something to every nervous system in the room, or watching the broadcast, or reading the follow-up. The limbic system is not processing the announcement. It is tracking the pattern: what was said, and what followed. Credibility is not lost through words. It is lost through the action signal that contradicts them. Leaders who believe they can sustain trust through announcement alone, regardless of what their actions broadcast, are misreading how communication actually works.

The same dynamic runs through the care sector. A practitioner who tells a family they will do something — make a referral, follow up, return a call — and does not, is not simply being unreliable. They are shaping what that family’s nervous system learns about the relationship. Trust in professional support is built or eroded not primarily through what practitioners say about their intentions, but through the continuous signal of whether actions and words align. Families whose experience of services is one of unkept promises become harder to engage not out of obstruction, but because their nervous systems have learned, accurately, what the pattern means.

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Topics: #InOtherWords #Communication #NonverbalCommunication #Mehrabian #Research #Psychology #HumanBehaviour #Trust #YoungFamilyLife

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Related YFL Content

Hey!, Want To Know how bodies tell the truth when words lie? — The automatic, below-awareness dimension of body signals — why the nervous system trusts nonverbal channels over contradictory words.

Hey!, Want To Know what Eric Berne discovered about body language in the 1950s? — Decades before brain scanning, Berne observed the same channel conflict Mehrabian later studied — and built a whole therapeutic framework around it.

Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis: From Freudian Theory to Observable Interaction — The full essay on how Berne’s work established that the meaning of an exchange is never in the words alone.

In Other Words… the body knows safety before the mind does — The companion IOW piece — exploring a different nonverbal channel, the one that bypasses language entirely.