Who speaks more: is it a man or a woman?

In many cultures, a stereotype may be a bit of a match: the idea that women would naturally be talked more naturally, men would be quiet and more cautious.

But how true is this? In this finding, what really happened or to find a legend, Researchers began to explain the number of words sung by the people of each species daily. And the results could be surprise.

Who speaks more?

In 2007, at the end of a famous study, he rejected the statement that women talked more: Both tenders, on average about 16,000 words per day. “There is a strong assumption that women talk more than men than men, C said Colin Tidwell, a clinical psychology researcher at the University of Arizona, one of the writers who participated in the study. “We wanted to see whether this assumption stopped when it was tested empirically,” he said.

However, more recently, the researchers discovered something interesting: The amount of words given daily tends to change according to age. Women between the ages of 25 and 64 speak on average 3000 words more per day in the life stages at the beginning and midst of adulthood.

This difference is not observed in other age groups observed in the study. In puberty (10 to 17 years), early adulthood (18 to 24 years) and men and women in the most advanced adulthood (65 years or over) share the same average words.

This led the researchers to another finding: In general, people talk less and less. Academicians suspect that this may be related to more dependence on digital communication that is by the verbal speech.

Why do women talk more?

Everything began in 2007, professor and psychologist Matthias Mehl of Arizona University to decide to test the assumption that women are much more talkative than men. To do this, he analyzed the data collected with 500 participants from an experiment with a group of men and women. These people used a portable recorder that recorded their conversations at random times.

By measuring these audio files, Mehl came to estimate the number of words spoken by one person a day. Apparently This analysis did not show a significant difference between the two sexes, This caused the research to gain national repercussions. However, the methods used in the study also had criticism.

Eighteen years later, Matthias Mehl has now joined his colleagues to reconstruct the experiment by using a much larger and more diverse example. In 22 separate studies in four countries, they analyzed 630,000 documented records and the participants ranged from 10 to 94 years. Thus, the new study covered 2,197 people – four times more than the original work.

What happened this time Women between 25 and 64 years (It was made with university students who do not exist in the original study) They talked more than men of the same age. While making an average of 21,845 words per day, men spoke 18,570.

Why is it not known in this age group where women speak more. A possibility has been avoided, that they tend to be children’s breeding years. Since women often play the role of the main caregivers, they may be talking to their children more than men during this time.

“Differences related to the species in children and family care are a possibility that can explain this difference. Biological factors such as hormones should also have a significant gender difference between the emerging adults. If the social generation changes were driving force, there should be a gender difference that gradually grows with elderly participants. However, both of them were not like that, Meh Mehl explained.

The researcher claims that it is important to state that there is a significant change between individuals of both sexes. This was even apparent even in the characteristics of the analyzed subjects. The least speaking person of the study (one male) gave about 100 words a day, while the most oral participant (also one male) spoke more than 120,000. “We people are systematically very different from both species, Meh says Mehl.

But maybe the most interesting aspect of the new research During the research periods, the number of oral words decreased. The data analyzed for the study was collected between 2005 and 2018, when the average number of words spoken per day decreased from about 16 thousand to 13 thousand. So, there is a decrease of approximately 300 words each year.

It is not yet known why this happens, but the possibility of our digital communication will allow us to talk less. Therefore, the internet is probably becoming increasingly quieter in time.

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