Have you ever wondered why so many people misinterpret posts and comments on Facebook? Have you or someone you know ever got upset with what someone has said on Facebook only to find out later that that’s not what they actually meant? Well there’s a simple explanation as to why this happens.
Dr Albert Mehrabian conducted a study in 1967 and claimed that communication could be broken down into words, tonality and non-verbal movements or body language. Further, he claimed that words only made up approximately 7% of the communication process, 38% of communication was the tonality people used and the remaining 55% comes from body language.
So, it seems that what you don’t say conveys more information than the words you speak. When you only hear the spoken word, say over the phone, you are getting less than half the message, and when you read the written word, you are only receiving 7% of the message.
When someone writes a post on Facebook, or comments on somebody else’s post, how do you know what they really mean. They are only giving you a very small percentage of what they are really thinking. The rest is up to you to take that tiny bit of information and then create the rest of the story for yourself.
So, there you go. How are you expected to fully understand a message when only a small portion of it is being communicated? If you want the whole story, the true message that’s being conveyed, go to the source, the person who is telling the story. That way they will have the opportunity to converse fully with you and allow you to truly understand what they are trying to say.
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