Kanye West on science: what the evidence says · JRE #1554
“Only 30 percent of our communication is is verbal.”
What the evidence says
The claim that a fixed share of human communication (commonly cited as 7, 30, or a similar minority percentage) is verbal traces back to psychologist Albert Mehrabian's late-1960s research, including a 1967 study on the decoding of inconsistent messages. That research measured how listeners judged a speaker's feelings and attitudes when facial expression, tone of voice, and word choice conveyed conflicting signals, it did not measure the informational content of communication in general. Mehrabian himself has repeatedly stated that his findings apply only to the narrow case of communicating feelings and attitudes, and are not applicable when a speaker is not talking about emotions. A 2025 study in Scientific Reports using an android to test facial, vocal, and verbal channels together found nonverbal cues did carry more emotional weight than words in that specific emotional-communication context, but the relative contributions it measured (roughly 48%/31%/21%) differed substantially from Mehrabian's original 55/38/7 ratio and from the 30 percent figure cited here. No body of peer-reviewed research supports a general claim that a specific fixed percentage, such as 30 percent, describes how much of everyday human communication overall is verbal. The current evidence status is that the general "X percent is verbal/nonverbal" formulation is a widely circulated oversimplification of research that was narrow in scope and is not designed to yield a single universal ratio.