what's more important in communication what you say or how you say it generally the consensus tends to lean more towards how we say things our body language or our nonverbal behaviors as social scientists call it if you look online you will quickly find this to be true most of the attention historically and currently has been paid towards the importance of nonverbal behavior within communication because nonverbal supply a lot of information that isn't projected or supplied verbally in fact as I was looking up examples for this talk I even came across an article titled what TED Talks speakers teach us about presenting and one of the things that they focus on is the power of nonverbal it's not what you say it's how you say it or is it I want to challenge that perhaps what we say our verbal behaviors are much more important than we realize perhaps what we say has been so much more important now that ever has been before in history and perhaps we've been focusing on the wrong aspect of communication for a while but first I want to step back and talk a little bit more about communication in general one of the most important things about communication is having other people understand what you're saying establishing mutual understanding after all communicating can be quite difficult even though I can really understand each other right and so how do people actually even develop a mutual understanding for each other in the first place well previously researchers and writers have suggested that the development of common ground understanding is largely dependent on action partners coming to use the same words and essentially the same way however researchers have weren't able to test this empirically in order to determine if it's true or not because there hadn't been anything that could measure what they wanted to measure which was the extent to which interaction partners use the same words in essentially the same way fortunately though in recent decades a new measure called latent semantic similarity or LSS that they will be referring to it as was proposed to be such measure so what exactly is LSS so LSS is a measure that is assessed by using a program called Lane semantic analysis which is an automated statistical method that establishes the contextual meaning of any text by analyzing the relationship among the words that are used in other words the LSS measure determines how similar to blocks of text or to groups of words are to each other based on the words that are used and how those words are used in relation to other words so for example if I'm talking to where my friends about our weekend plans the LSS measure would first take all the words that I say compare it against all the words that my friend says and determine the amount of shared meaning that exists between us within our conversation and so as someone who studies Social Psychology and someone who is especially interested in how people come to understand each other especially the processes and the behaviors that underlie it my colleagues and I decided to test this measure in order to determine if it can actually be a legitimate measure of how much people understand each other and so in our very first study which has been published in the Journal of language and social psychology we analyzed a sample of videotaped recordings and in these recordings were the initial or a series of initial interactions between pairs of strangers who had just met for the very first time and so they had never met before and so they were having a conversation for the first time ever with each other so we analyzed this and we also analyzed and measured a wide variety of nonverbal and verbal behaviors that occurred within these interactions and we found that the LSS measure was indeed a legitimate measure of how much people understood each other so now we have something that can empirically measure this great so next we wanted to determine the behaviors that would significantly predict high levels of mutual understanding in other words what were the behaviors that were most important when you are communicating with someone and you want to establish common ground understanding and so in our second study we again analyzed a two completely separate samples of initial interactions that occurred between pairs of strangers again and then we also analyzed a wide variety of verbal and nonverbal behaviors and we found that the only behavior that consistently predicted how much people understood each other were their verbal behaviors how the amount of talking that they engaged in and how much how many questions they asked each other all the other behaviors like gestures or smiling laughing gazes nonverbal acknowledgments all of these nonverbal behaviors were not essential for the development of common ground understanding now that doesn't mean that nonverbal behaviors are not important in communication they are important when it comes to creating an emotionally Pleasant and involving interaction but they're not important when it comes to developing mutual understanding with each other and what is important is what we say the words that we use and so the the science behind this is only one reason why I argue that we should be really focusing more on what we say rather than how we say it the second reason and perhaps more important reason is the Internet the Internet has drastically changed how we communicate with each other on a daily basis and it has done so in a very very short amount of time as most of you will probably remember the internet became publicly available in the 1990s and up until then people primarily communicated either in person over the telephone or sent letters to name a few today how do we primarily communicate we send each other emails we send each other text messages we send each other instant messages we comment on each other's facebook statuses we tweet if you're on an online dating website which is becoming lis becoming increasingly popular and if you see someone that you're interested in what do you do you send up a message we engage in this form of communication so much every day and it has literally allowed us to communicate with anybody on the planet at the touch of our fingertips whether or not that person is halfway across the world or if that person is right next to us the Internet and the technological advances that have resulted from it have made communication so much easier and has change the face of communication just in general and the resulting different types of communication all have one thing in common they're all primarily text-based they consist solely upon the words that we use our verbal behaviors no one is going to know whether or not you had shifty eyes or that you were nervously twiddling your thumbs whenever you send a text message or an email or an instant message our body language our nonverbals don't really matter in this type of communication that dominates our everyday lives and yet we continue to focus on it and again I don't believe that nonverbal behaviors are not important they are but if we are to live in a society where we primarily engage in this type of communication where this type of communication is so largely intertwined with our sense of self our well-being and our livelihood we should adapt accordingly and we should begin to place more importance on the behavior that we engage in the most and that and that has the most influence the words that we use we should be focusing more on what we say rather than how we say thank you very much