new study, women DON'T talk more than men:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19618373/

WASHINGTON - 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.

When guys get chatty
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 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.

Indeed, Mehl said, one study they found, done in workplaces, showed men talking more.

‘Urban legend’
Still, the idea that women use nearly three times as many words a day as men has taken on the status of an “urban legend,” he said.

“We realized we had the data,” Mehl said in a telephone interview, so they went back to their recordings and calculated the actual numbers.

Their research began with one group of students in 1998, two groups sampled in 2001, two in 2003 and a final group in 2004. One of the 2003 groups involved 51 students in Mexico, the rest were all in the United States.

The students were fitted with unobtrusive recorders that sampled their conversations — the students didn’t know when the recorders were on. From the samples, a total number of words for the day could be calculated.

Of the six groups sampled, women used more words than men in three and men used more words than women in the other three, including the one in Mexico.

The research was limited to college students, but Pennebaker said he believes it would probably apply to others in the same age range.

“The question is, how it applies to people as we get older,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Mehl said he thinks it should apply across age groups, but he wondered how it would be affected by different cultures.

 

all i know is that dave talks and talks and talks. he's irish, you know.

 

yea, i can talk and talk and talk...but usually i just choose not to haha, but once i get going, i can go on and on

 

They just NOW figured this out! just start talking about sports or video games. guys cant shut up!

 

exactly...and some wonder why i work at a sports camp

 

Men talk about football while women talk about shopping.

Frequently, that is...

Which generates a whole lot of words.

 

i don't get shopping. wandering around aimlessly while looking at stuff to blow your cash on? i don't understand. if i want a shirt, i go get a shirt.

 

You are not a woman!

...and to think that I've fallen for your facade for so many years!

 

i still have titties, though. surely you don't mind if the equipment is original or an upgrade. you're an enlightened man.

 

I think that the entire hipforum population would agree that only photographic evidence can indeed show that you are a woman, and not some filthy British kniiiiiiget!

 

i'm working on it! shit, people!! didn't take any pics the other night, though. and i was looking GOOD. damn. why don't people have a camera around when i look GOOD? huh?! huh?! i ask you! it's not fair.

 

There is an easy solution for this:

When I'm at college, I always have my camera in my messenger bag, and if it's a pretty day or if I look extra hot... I just ask someone to take a picture.

It's a good way to meet people.

 

pshaw, i always knew that my bf talks more than i do, even if we arent talking about video games (though he does babble about those a lot)

 

Thats funny. I know that guy who did this research.

 

surprise surprise, as if anyone with half a brain would be.

BOTH women AND men run off at the mouth Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay toooooo much.

way more then is any kind of good sense for either themselves or each other.

everytime someone talks without having something to say, other then as an expression of some sort of spirit connectedness, they are talking too much, no mater what they have between their legs.

i'd love to live in a monestary where people didn't talk at all, if they weren't all about a bunch of religeous mumbo jumbo.

where people got togather two or three times a day to eat and maybe once every other day or so to make and listen to wordless music, and the rest of the time to go about the things that need be done silently. each one having a small room, just big enough for a bed and a computer. and all the communicating that needed to be done over the local area network, or posted on pegboards.

that would be so totally cool. especially if each room could be soundproofed so that what people listen to when they are alone in it wouldn't be forced on their neighbors.

i'd give just about anything to be able to live like that. anything except having my head messed with by a bunch of arbitrary assumptions.

=^^=
..../\...

 

HoW cOuLd a biTch TalK wHeN sHeaways gOt A dIcK iN HEr MoUth?TAt Y uS MeNz bE tAlkIn' mO HoEs!

 

Of course they don't. They just talk about less interesting things.

Like themelves.

 

as a guy, I talk about shit that makes no sense...... yeah we do talk but its mostly bullshit

 

this i would mostly agree with, except that it seems to apply equally or nearly equally to both genders as well. and where it doesn't, it's because of what different genders are RAISED to be interested in and not interested, which in either case doesn't have that much to do with what i am and am not.

(i equally don't like cars, football, either kind, OR soap operas, and i do happen to be male, but don't see what that has to do with anything outside of sex itself, which i no long give that much of a rat about either, though i think it's cool, for younger people then myself, with each other.)

=^^=
.../\...

 

the problem that this study overlooks is that women talk when you wish they would shut the fuck up

still, i suspect this study to be suppressed by all the world's major religions as it undercuts their foundation