domiguy
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kittinSol
Apparently, the idea that women talk more than men is a stereotype that holds little ground in truth.
"An article in this week's issue of Science blasts the popular myth that women are more talkative than men.
Researchers outfitted 396 college students — 345 Americans and 51 Mexicans — with devices that automatically recorded them every 12 1/2 minutes, which amounts to 4 percent of a person's daily utterances.
The researchers found that women speak a little more than 16,000 words a day. Men speak a little less than 16,000 words. The difference is not statistically significant.
Psychologist Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona says the three top talkers in the study — uttering up to 47,000 words a day — were all men. So was the most taciturn subject, who spoke only 700 words a day, on average.
Mehl says he and his colleagues were surprised at the outcome. They had tentatively bought into the popular stereotype that women are the more talkative sex.
[...]
Mehl says the supposed talkativeness of women is often mentioned in pop-psychology books.
"The typical scenario is — a man comes home from work at night, has used 6,850 words and with 150 left over just wants to relax and not talk," Mehl says. "And the woman welcomes the husband with about 7,856 words left over. And that's where all the problems start."
Mehl guesses that the talkativeness claim "evolved as an explanation for what scientists call the demand/withdrawal pattern." That is, the situation where a woman demands to talk through problems and her male partner withdraws emotionally.
"We use our gender magnifying glass and over-generalize from that," Mehl says. "Instead of saying that men tend to talk less and women tend to talk more, we say 'Women always talk and men never talk.'"
NPR.org
I read this as well awhile back. I didn't like the parameters of the test in that they utilized "college students" as their test group. It is a rather artificial environment where exchanges can be kind of forced due to living environments, social events and going to class.
Thought it was a very poor choice of people to watch to reach an accurate conclusion on the talking habits of people in the "real world."
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