The women spoke an average of 16,215 words and the men 15,669 words, over a typical 17-hour waking day.
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SYDNEY: Despite the widespread stereotype that women talk more than men, a detailed new study shows that both genders use an average of 16,000 words a day.
According to the stereotype, which is perpetuated in psychology texts and has been reported in the media for at least 15 years, women talk almost three times as much as men. One textbook cites that women use around 20,000 words a day compared to men's 7,000.
"These findings have been reported widely by national media and have entered the cultural mainstream," said psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin in the USA.
"Although many people believe the stereotypes of females as talkative and males as reticent, there is no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended period of time," he said.
Chatterbox
To redress the lack of data Pennebaker and a team of psychologists have performed the most detailed survey yet of loquacity in the genders, the results of which are published today in the U.S. journal Science.
Over eight years, the researchers developed a completely new technology for tracking spoken words. Their electronically activated recorder (EAR) is an unobtrusive digital voice recorder that automatically captures snippets of conversations evert 12 minutes throughout the day and measures the number of words spoken. From this the researchers can extrapolate an estimate for how many words a participant spoke in an entire day.
Between 1998 and 2004 the psychologists analysed the daily word-usage of 396 U.S. and Mexican students of both genders. Their results showed that there is little statistical difference between the number of words spoken by men and women in the study. The women spoke an average of 16,215 words and the men 15,669 words, over a typical 17-hour waking day.
"What's a 500-word difference, compared to the 45,000-word difference between the most and the least talkative person [in the study]?" said co-author and psychologist Matthias Mehl from the University of Arizona in Tuscon. "Just to illustrate the magnitude of difference – among the three most talkative males in the study, one used 47,000 words. The least talkative male spoke just a little more than 500."
Talkativeness hypothesis
"The project has the advantage of analysing conversations unobtrusively and in a natural context. So, it provides a more valid test of the talkativeness hypothesis than many previous studies in this area," commented Mark Rubin from the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle in Australia.
People behave in an artificial manner in a laboratory setting, often trying to present themselves in a positive light when asked to report their attitudes and behaviour, said Rubin. "The present research deals with these problems very well."
The results are interesting, but could be culturally specific to Mexico and the U.S. commented Mia Stephens from the School of Communication at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. In some societies it could be the norm for there to be more of a difference she said, for example "Australian masculinity might perhaps be characterised in terms of taciturn speech behaviour that differs from loquacious feminised behaviour."
"It is too early to kiss goodbye to [the myth of gender culture], and researchers are finding out more every day about differences in learning styles between boys and girls, differences in perception of space etc., between males and females," said Stephens.
Nevertheless, "We therefore conclude, on the basis of available evidence, that the widespread and highly publicised stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded," write the authors.
