CHATTERBOXES?: Women--often stereotyped as gossips--have long believed to talk more than men. A new study finds that is not true.
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About a year ago, Louann Brizendine, founder and director of the University of California, San Francisco's Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic, published The Female Brain. One of the most cited gems within its pages was a claim that women are chatterboxes, speaking an average of 20,000 words per day, nearly three times the mere 7,000 spoken by men.
Seemed to make sense, given the rep of women as purveyors of gossip, not to mention creatures incapable of keeping their traps shut. Right? Wrong.
A new study published today in Science reports men and woman actually use roughly the same number of words daily.
James Pennebaker, chair of the University of Texas at Austin's psychology department, says he was skeptical of the lopsided stats when he saw them quoted in an interview with Brizendine in The New York Times Magazine. "I read that and I knew it couldn't be true simply because we've run too many studies," he says, "it just didn't make sense." In fact, he had been collecting data over the past decade with colleagues at the University of Arizona in Tucson that specifically showed that the sexes are about equal when it comes to a war of words.
After working with posttraumatic stress disorder patients for years, Pennebaker had noticed a deficiency in people's self-reporting of their experiences. So, he devised "a measure that would capture people's real life," he says. His device, called EAR (for electronically activated recorder) is a digital recorder that subjects can store in a sheath similar to a case for glasses in their purses or pockets. The EAR samples 30 seconds of ambient noise (including conversations) every 12.5 minutes; carriers cannot tamper with recordings.
Researchers used this device to collect data on the chatter patterns of 396 university students (210 women and 186 men) at colleges in Texas, Arizona and Mexico. They estimated the total number of words that each volunteer spoke daily, assuming they were awake 17 of 24 hours. In most of the samples, the average number of words spoken by men and women were about the same. Men showed a slightly wider variability in words uttered, and boasted both the most economical speaker (roughly 500 words daily) and the most verbose yapping at a whopping 47,000 words a day. But in the end, the sexes came out just about even in the daily averages: women at 16,215 words and men at 15,669. In terms of statistical significance, Pennebaker says, "It's not even remotely close to different." He does point out that women tend to jaw more about other people, whereas men are apt to hold forth on more concrete objects—so the stereotypes of ladies as gossips and guys engaging in car talk can live on.
As far as the myth of women being more chatty than men, Pennebaker thanks Brizendine for bringing it to his attention. As for the legend's origins, University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman speculated in a blog last year: "My current best guess is that a marriage counselor invented this particular meme about 15 years ago, as a sort of parable for couples with certain communication problems, and others have picked it up and spread it, while modulating the numbers to suit their tastes."
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4 Comments
Add Comment"There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSmart people can make statistics say anything that they want.
I know how much my wife talks on the phone with her friends everyday.
RE:Kenj1960
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswell yeah, but do you count how much you talk when your with your own friends? Also, these are averages, so although your wife may be a super talker, there might be some other lady that talks much less evening her out or something.
"But in the end, the sexes came out just about even in the daily averages: women at 16,215 words and men at 15,669." so lie maybe your wife said the whole number at one go at the phone while you probably spread it throughout the day. or something :)
"Based on the Nielsen Company tracking, an average woman talks for 818 minutes per month on the phone, compared with 640 minutes per month of ‘talktime’ consumed by an average man. Moreover, women send way more text messages per month (716) than men do (555)."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.emirates247.com/lifestyle/it-s-official-women-talk-text-more-than-men-2011-12-26-1.434582
The context of talking matters a lot, I'd think, and the study in the article doesn't break down the context very much. Surely how much you talk depends on what kinds of tasks you're typically doing. For example, I suspect computer programmers talk a lot less than telemarketers, who are paid just to talk, and that this difference greatly overwhelms any differences caused by gender, if any exist. Somehow, the study needed to separate work/school speech from leisure speech. Perhaps the Nielsen study of phone/text habits reflect leisure speech? Or perhaps women just talk more than men do on the phone -- though it's hard to see why a person would love talking on the phone, but not talking in person.
The study cited here also appears to assume that what's true of college students is true of everyone. Is that good science? Every person who majors in science needs to be required to make the following statement before receiving a degree: "I will never read or conduct a study and afterwards make a claim that is more general than the study I read or conducted." At the very least, scientists (and science journalists) should tape such a statement to their computer monitors.
Or this variation:
"Do not knowingly mislead, or allow others to be misled, about scientific matters."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath_for_Scientists
This study, purportedly about men and women, suffers from the usual psychology study failure - the "Triple C". It uses a narrow socioeconomic selection from a local campus population because they're Close, Cheap and Convenient. I'm sure most, if not all, of the references in the study are similar. It does add to the publication list and publicity and that's what finally counts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere seems to be no secondary verification/disputation of data, even from anecdotal sources (several of which appear in the comments) - it seems a shame that the researchers would so badly neglect doing their homework.