The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

A study of the average PowerPoint presentation

How many slides does the average PowerPoint document have? What proportion of them have images on them? Or animation, or transitions? My students will answer this question comprehensively in an upcoming research project that they are running as part of my market research class. As our sample frame, we will use the .com, .org., .edu, and .mil domains on the Internet, and we have developed an approach to gather a large, genuinely random sample of a few hundred PowerPoint files, which we will then analyze. We are planning to execute this later this month (September) and then post the results here.

In the meantime, if any of you have any characteristics that you'd like us to add to the research, let me know, in the form of a comment to this post.

Fear of Public Speaking?

In response to yesterday's post about Prof. Mehrabian's research, Nan Peck emailed me another example of false generalization of research.  She wrote:

The other example is related to speech nervousness. Too many people cite a 1973 Bruskin survey published in David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace's book, The Book of Lists. Bruskin's group asked 3,000 Americans to list their greatest fears. Respondents (41 percent of them) reported that their greatest fear is speaking before a group. This fear was followed by a fear of heights, insects, financial problems, deep water, illness, death, flying, loneliness, and dogs. Unfortunately, Bruskin's report has since been cited as sufficient support that Americans consider public speaking a fate worse than death. Do you imagine that more Americans would rather jump out of an airplane, undergo serious surgery, or spend a month in a prison than give a formal presentation? [By the way, Bruskin's 1973 study also revealed that 20 percent of Americans admit that they have never suffered from stage fright at any point in their lives!]

In 1993, the Bruskin/Goldring Report followed up on this research with a survey asking 1,000 adults "about the things of which nightmares are made..." Again, speaking before a group made the top of the list. But dreams about public speaking, financial problems, heights, and deep water are quite a different matter than reporting what we fear most. [In both surveys, men reported having a greater fear of financial problems than of speaking in public.]

Thanks Nan.  Let's keep debunking these myths. 

Postscript - March 17, 2008: That said, it appears that many people are in fact very afraid of public speaking. So here's a helpful thought.

93% of communication comes from non-verbal signs... or does it?

Have you heard this one before? "Only 7% of communication comes through words, the rest comes from non-verbal communication: 38% from tone of voice and 55% from body language." Did you ever wonder whether this was actually true? It seems a little extreme: is a wink more effective than hard facts when you're pitching a proposal to some senior executives?

Interestingly enough, the claim is false. As Dale Emery explained some time ago, its origin is in some research published by Albert Mehrabian in the late 1970's and early 1980's. The thing is, Mehrabian's work was focused exclusively on personal communication about feelings of like or dislike: when people are talking to one another about how much they like/dislike each other. In Mehrabian's own words, from his website:

... this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

Robert Befus provides an indepth analysis of this as part of his Presentation Facts series.

So to apply this finding to every other form of communication, and particularly to business communication, is a gross misrepresentation of the research.

Whenever you hear someone attempt to perpetuate this hoax, set them right.