The stereotype that women are much more talkative than men is pervasive across many cultures, but a widely reported study by University of Arizona researchers in 2007 refuted the claim, finding that men and women speak roughly the same number of words per day – around 16,000.
A new, larger follow-up to that study paints a more nuanced picture, suggesting that women may be the chattier gender, but only during a certain period of life.
"There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men," said co-lead study author Colin Tidwell, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the U of A. "We wanted to see whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested."
Researchers found that women between the ages of 25 and 65 – the life stages of early and middle adulthood – spoke on average about 3,000 more words per day than their male counterparts. Significant gender differences did not appear in the study's other age groups: adolescence (ages 10 to 17), emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 24) and older adulthood (65 and up).
The researchers also discovered that people in general might be becoming less talkative, a finding they suspect is linked to an increasing reliance on digital communication. Their findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Revisiting an enduring question
In 2007, U of A psychologist Matthias Mehl tested the common assumption that women are much more talkative than men by analyzing data collected from 500 male and female study participants who wore a portable recording device dubbed the EAR – Electronically Activated Recorder – that turns on at random intervals to capture snippets of daily conversations.
Using those audio files, Mehl developed estimates for the number of words spoken by a person per day. When his analysis revealed no significant gender difference, the provocative finding – published in the journal Science – made national headlines. But the study also invited criticism due to its limitations: Its participants were almost entirely college-aged, and most lived in the same city – Austin, Texas.
Eighteen years later, Mehl and his collaborators – including Tidwell; Valeria Pfeifer, a U of A psychology postdoctoral researcher; and Alexander Danvers, a former postdoctoral researcher at the U of A – sought to replicate the original findings with a larger and more diverse sample. They analyzed 630,000 EAR recordings from 22 separate studies conducted in four countries, with participants ranging in age from 10 to 94. The study included 2,197 individuals – four times as many as many as the original study.
A significant gender difference only emerged for one age group: those 25-64, an age range that had been missing in the original study of college students. While women in the early to middle adulthood age group spoke 21,845 words a day on average, men spoke 18,570.
The researchers don't know for sure why women are the more talkative gender during the near-40-year stretch between 25 and 64, but they say one possibility is that those tend to be the child rearing years, and women, who often assume the role of primary caregiver, might be speaking more than men to their children during that time.
"Gender-linked differences in child rearing and family care are one possibility that could account for this difference," said Mehl, senior author of the study and a professor in the U of A Department of Psychology . "If biological factors like hormones were to be the main cause, a sizeable gender difference should have also been present among emerging adults. If societal generational changes were to be the driving force, there should have been a gradually increasing gender difference with older participants. Neither, though, was the case."
Men and women are both talking less
While women may be more talkative than men at some points in life, Mehl said it's important to note that there is significant variation among individuals in both genders. The study's least talkative person – a man – spoke an estimated 100 words a day, while the most verbose participant – also male – spoke more than 120,000.
"We humans are so much more different individually than the two genders systematically," Mehl said.
When looking across the full range of study participants, irrespective of gender or age, the researchers also found that the average number of words spoken per day appears to have decreased over the years. The data analyzed for the study was collected between 2005 and 2018, over which time the average number of words spoken per day fell from about 16,000 to about 13,000.
"We did a full analysis looking at what year the data were collected and found that, indeed, 300 spoken words on average per year go missing," said study co-lead author Pfeifer.
Additional research is needed to determine the reason for the drop, but a rise in digital communication tools, including texting and social media, are likely part of the equation, Mehl said.
Mehl also said more work is needed to better understand what role a person's level of talkativeness and socializing might play in human health and well-being. To that end, he is co-developing a "SocialBit," similar in concept to a Fitbit, that would measure people's minutes of daily conversation without recording the content, using an algorithm that classifies ambient audio into whether or not it contains conversations.
"I'm fascinated by the idea that we know how much we need to sleep, we know how much we need to exercise, and people are wearing Fitbits all the time, but we have no idea how much we're supposed to socialize," he said. "The evidence is very strong that socializing is linked to health, at least to the same extent as physical activity and sleep are. It's just another health behavior."
