Saturday, November 24, 2007

Study: Women don't talk more than guys

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CITYLIFE / Hip & New

Study: Women don't talk more than guys

(CRI)
Updated: 2007-07-10 15:40

Another stereotype?- chatty gals and taciturn guys - bites the dust.

Turns out, when you actually count the words, there isn't much difference
between the sexes when it comes to talking.

A team led by Matthias R. Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at
the University of Arizona, came up with the finding, which is published
in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods
ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated
how many words they used in the course of a day.

The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669.

The difference: 546 words: "Not statistically significant," say the
researchers.

"What's a 500-word difference, compared with the 45,000-word difference
between the most and the least talkative persons" in the study, said Mehl.

Co-author James W. Pennebaker, chairman of the psychology department at
the University of Texas, said the researchers collected the recordings as
part of a larger project to understand how people are affected when they
talk about emotional experiences.

They were surprised when a magazine article asserted(宣称)that
women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men.
If there had been that big a difference, he thought, they should have
noticed it.

They found that the 20,000-7,000 figures have been used in popular books
and magazines for years. But they couldn't find any research supporting
them.

"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
periods of time," Pennebaker said.

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