“May I ask where you gathered that information? I’d like to learn more.”
It is a simple, straightforward statement that should be on everyone’s lips, and yet the general lack of facts in regard to just about anything is tearing so many of us apart. Oh, I am not talking about politics, or baseball trade rumors or a fake piece of medical research a friend of a friend thinks they might have seen on social media.
Facts are important, and the lack of those facts has created a national sea of turmoil of anger, baseless opinions and heated indignation. All of which gets in the way of us connecting.
Nothing big, nothing small
Interestingly, the misinformation that sometimes causes friends, families, business associates to walk away from one another include silly jokes posted online, gossip, unfounded arguments over trivial matters, and trivial differences over everything from what constitutes a healthy diet to which days everyone needs to be in the office.
Misinformation primes what I call “the angry pump.” It doesn’t take much for nothing big, nothing small, meaningless discrepancies to escalate into major issues. Why? Because so many people don’t get the facts straight or repeat anything as fact at all. Many folks are often negligent in finding the source of the misinformation. When people cling to something as truth because they saw it somewhere on social media or heard it from “a reliable source,” it helps nothing, especially the truth.
Dr. Albert Mehrabian
If you’ve ever attended a communication course, chances are you may have heard psychologist and professor Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s misquoted research originally published in his groundbreaking 1971 book, “Silent Messages.”
What Dr. Mehrabian said about communication: “The rule states that 7 percent of meaning is communicated through spoken word, 38 percent through tone of voice, and 55 percent through body language.”
I dare you to Google the above rule and note the volume of “communication experts” who state the above as fact WITHOUT including the context of Dr. Mehrabian’s work. In fact, there are so many that Dr. Mehrabian created a YouTube video clarifying his research specifically was referring to emotions, affect and feelings. He chides that his findings have been overgeneralized over the decade. He was– when people are expressing how they feel about somebody or something – within that context – summarizing the findings from two separate psychological studies. A summary is not the same thing as a detailed analysis of the research. As most of us understand, most individuals interpreting data they believe they have found on the internet, skim and summarize – at best.
However, when interviewed at the source, Dr. Mehrabian said, “If and when the listener loses perspective, the entire context of the communication may be disregarded. Putting it another way, if you’re already mad at someone and they ask, “Are you okay?” and you angrily respond, “I’m fine!” but your tone and facial expression lets them know you’re ticked, how does that skew the conversation? In that context, chances are your words don’t hold as much meaning as your tone and body language. Ah…that makes sense.
The Rage at Present
In a recent Forbes article, a serious pattern of misinformation was uncovered in regards to the Israel-Hamas war. I present this not to get political and add to the vitriol, but to reveal how assumptions, mainstream social media platforms and the angry representations of outrage have been targeted toward college students.
At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, a Facebook account purporting to be a recent Penn grad and current Penn employee (with additional degrees from Georgetown and Fordham) was for weeks posting anti-Israel diatribes on the platform.
A deeper dive into the account showed that the name on the account, Kathleen Margaret Connelly, never attended or worked at any of those schools. Forbes eventually traced Kathleen’s profile photo to a young actress in Ireland who was disturbed to learn the fake account had been using her likeness to spread hate and misinformation.
What’s the solution? Given my passion towards curiosity, compassion and connection, we can start by checking for accuracy before cutting, pasting, or repeating something we heard or saw.
When all is said and done, the simple, innocent phrase, “May I ask where you gathered that information? I’d like to learn more,” may be the best possible approach to clarify and verify.