Women no more chatty than men, study finds

[Al-khiyal]

July 5, 2007 -- We've all been led to believe that women love nothing more than to gab all day, while men are more likely to keep silent. But new research challenges the notion.

Matthias R. Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at The University of Arizona, set out to debunk the growing "urban legend" that a woman uses about three times as many words in a day as a man.

He particularly wanted to challenge the findings in the bestselling book "The Female Brain" by neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine that contends that women use 20,000 words a day, while a man uses only about 7,000.

Mehl and the others recorded the conversations of nearly 400 U.S. and Mexican male and female university students who were between the ages of 19 and 25 years old in a series of studies conducted over six years.

To catch all of this chit-chat, they developed an electronically-activated recorder that digitally logged the daily conversations of those who wore the device. The participants could not control the recording device, which automatically recorded for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes, and did not know when the device was on.

The results:

* Women in the study spoke a daily average of 16,215 words

* Men spoke an average of 15,669 words

So true, the women win, but not by a statistically significant margin. Mehl also noted that there are "very large individual differences around this mean."

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," Mehl said.

The research is reported in the July 6 issue of the journal Science.

Mehl admits that he studied only college students, but says the study showed no support for the idea that women have larger "lexical budgets" than men, any more than it did that vocabulary gender differences have a basis in evolution.

But the last word, at least from this study, is that "the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness and male reticence is unfounded."

Women no more chatty than men, study finds

[Cheba_Mami]

they have chosed the wrong women

should have picked me to record all day not enough recordingspace? think of at least 100000GBites

[Bent_Bladi]

I don't know, there are some women that SERIOUSLY need to shut their damn traps - but honestly, most of the women I know don't talk more than men...

I don't say much at all - I barely use the phone and when I entertain my friends w/ my extreme facial expressions - body language says it ALL!!

[Cheba_Mami]

i think it really depends on the person, i love to talk a lot but do not use too much word to explain a simple thing. in fact i hate women who take an hour to explain/tell something really simple. Keep it to the point.

Men in my environment, genuinly speak only when they need to speak and use the less possible words for it. communication is just only if necessary.

Often men do not talk about 'emotional' subjects and none do they distract form the original topic of the conversation.

Again, it really depends on the person....

[Bent_Bladi]

true... i'd say i talk more with my fingers (typing) than with my tongue...

i guess i hate all the fluff that's necessary to start a conversation... "keefek?" "wallah mnee7a, keefek inti?" "alhamdulilah, keef akhwatek, keef ummek, keef abouki?"

IT DRIVES ME CRAZY!! lol

[Cheba_Mami]

'keefek' is small enough to start up.

this study is based on 400 people. too small to be true for 6 billion world population

[Bent_Bladi]

yeah...

well, to be honest - whenever i give someone a call, i have to get through the forest of keefeks and shloneks and all that stuff that we already know the answer to (alhamdulilah) until we get to the point...

okay, okay - lemmi modify that - it's not so bad when you have to go through that fluff with people you actually care about keefhon... lol. And i admit if someone didn't say "keefek" then i'd think they were being rude - and vice versa.... sigh... i guess that's just how society is . We have to accept the annoyances to avoid larger ones