Study confirms cliché Women do talk more than men - but only at a certain point in time
Do women need to talk more than men? Yes, but only in a certain phase of their lives, says a new study from the USA.
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- A study by the University of Arizona shows that women between the ages of 25 and 65 speak around 3,000 more words per day than men; outside of this age group, there is no difference.
- The researchers explain this with social and professional obligations such as raising children and family organization, not with hormonal factors.
- Overall, daily talk time is decreasing, presumably due to digital communication, and a new device is designed to measure how much social interaction is optimal for well-being.
Do women actually talk more than men? According to a recent study by the University of Arizona, this stereotype is not entirely unfounded.
Between the ages of 25 and 65, women use an average of around 3,000 more words than men every day. Outside of this age group, there is no such difference.
Back in 2007, a study by the University of Arizona challenged this common assumption. At that time, the analysis showed that both sexes were similarly talkative with around 16,000 words per day. However, the new study analyzed data from four countries and 2197 people and came to a much more differentiated conclusion.
Measurement with portable recording device
The researchers collected 630,000 conversation excerpts using a portable recording device, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR). The analysis shows: Women in middle adulthood speak around 21,845 words a day, while men average 18,570 words. However, no significant differences were found in the age groups 10 to 17 years, 18 to 24 years and 65 years and older.
Study author Colin Tidwell explains that the aim was to test a widespread assumption with empirical data. The results suggest that societal and social factors play a decisive role.
Responsibility for family and career
The research team sees one possible explanation in the social obligations that women take on more frequently in this phase of life. Psychologist Matthias Mehl, one of the authors of the study, suspects that raising children and family organization in particular could increase the need for communication.
Hormonal factors alone are unlikely to be the cause. If these were decisive, the difference would have to occur in younger adults. Social changes do not fully explain the phenomenon either, as the difference has not increased over the decades. Rather, professional and family demands seem to be the decisive factors.
What do 3,000 more words mean?
But how big is this difference really? A simple rule of thumb: 1000 spoken words correspond to around ten minutes of speaking time. This means that women in middle adulthood speak around 30 minutes more than men every day - a noticeable difference over weeks and years.
For comparison: an average news report on television lasts 90 seconds, a typical social media video two to three minutes. This means that women between the ages of 25 and 65 speak around nine more manuscript pages per day than men.
Talking time is decreasing overall
Another finding of the study: people are speaking less overall today than in the past. The average number of words per day fell from 16,000 to 13,000. Around 300 spoken words "disappear" every year. Study author Valeria Pfeifer suspects that the influence of digital communication could be a cause. Many people are increasingly replacing conversations with text messages or social media.
"We conducted a comprehensive analysis, taking into account the year of data collection, and found that an average of 300 fewer spoken words are actually used each year," explains Pfeifer.
After sleep and steps: Word counter to come
The study also makes it clear that individual differences are often greater than gender-specific differences. For example, the most taciturn participant - a man - only spoke around 100 words a day, while the most talkative - also a man - used more than 120,000 words (!).
Psychologist Mehl is currently working on a device called SocialBit, which measures the number of daily conversations in a similar way to a fitness tracker - without recording the content. The aim is to find out how much social interaction is optimal for well-being.
"We know exactly how much sleep or exercise we need, but not how much social interaction is healthy," says Mehl. Initial indications suggest that communication could be just as important for health as exercise or sleep.