Do women talk more than men? | Hacker News Reader

Do women talk more than men?

bps.org.uk

25 pointsdomofutu27 comments

Lately the field of psychology is having a reproducibility crisis, but not these psychologists! This Time the study is not subject to any factors about the test set at all! Nothing about culture, age, socioeconomic status, health, weather, life events, or conversation partners is gonna stop these researchers from making blanket statements about 49 and 51% of humanity, respectively.

Thankfully they call out how inconclusive their conclusions are.

I would not recommend saying to friends “did you know they did a study and women speak more than men?” Because it’s only true for the population in the study (with all their cultural characteristics) and only for the moments the word detection apparatuses were on.

12 000 words is ~1h30 of talking non stop. These averages seem pretty high to me... on a median day I probably speak about 50 words, and my average must be around 1000.

However, the average number of words I listen to is several times higher. It would be interesting to do such a study, with a similar methodology: do women listen more than men?

50 words is strikingly low. You must lead an unusually quiet life, or perhaps you rely more on written communication. Do you work? If so, do you work mostly alone, or collaborate with others through text? I'm genuinely curious... it's such a surprisingly small number!

yea, 50 is almost monklike vows to me. Even the sentence "it is a cold day today" would be over 10% of that

First, I live alone. Then, work mostly involves written communication especially when remote, and on the days I'm at the office communication is generally limited to saying hi and very small amount of small talk. Most agile meetings are useless to me so I don't say a word. Other that work interactions I basically greet and thank the cashier and bus driver.

And generally I just find it more polite to shut up and listen than talk about stuff people aren't interested in, which happens to be the majority of what I'm interested in.

Sure the median might be 50 but it's kind of anecdotally low. For example a typical week might be: 0, 10, 50, 50, 500, 2000, 5000. So the median might also be 500 under slightly different circumstances.

A lot of people just talk a lot. Even when she's alone, I'm near someone who probably talk on the phone 1-2 hours a day. That's in addition to all of the work and actual physical socializing.

Also, families talk a lot, and many couples are fairly chatty.

I meant to comment on you being on the low end of the range, but after typing that all I can think about is how hard it is to properly isolate variables when doing this study. Quite a lot to control for!

This comment alone is more than your median spoken words in a day?

Why is that surprising? Some people have more anxiety talking in person compared to being able to spend time crafting exactly what they want to say, some people might not live with other people or have any strong reason to go out to where other people are frequently...it seems like there could be so many potential reasons for this that aren't that weird, and I'm someone who's the opposite and probably averages twice that many words per minute when talking with anyone (due to a lifelong habit of talking much faster than I probably need to and often finding it easier to think though things out loud, which could be related to the first thing).

I don't talk due to disinterest in "people" things. I can say thousands of words if you project a stereotype in astronomy, physics, medieval/fantasy warfare, and so on. But most people don't do that, so all they hear is hi and mhmm/yes/no. Politeness apart, couldn't care less how's the day going, who seen whom and other people stuff.

Also I know/knew enough women who were mostly silent both in small and large groups (don't know the reason though).

I don't think it's gender-specific per se, but in my personal, opinionated experience the "women talk more" effect is due to the perceived uselessness of the talks that the most talkative of them have. When people talk about the topics you're not interested in, you think "they can't shut up can they" much more than when you're interested or neutral.

Yeah, I don't disagree with you that topic is super important, and in my experience at least, gender doesn't really seem to have any impact on the average amount of talking I notice people doing. I'm mostly just surprised that people seemed shocked that the parent commenter only expects that their median number of words per day is 50, especially when they also mentioned their _average_ is much higher than that. To me, that seems like someone who occasionally says quite a lot (maybe when meeting up with friends or family, or going to some sort of social event) but happens to live alone and doesn't feel the need to make small talk when they go out to run an errand or something (which also might not be very frequent, given how much can be ordered online these days).

Seems like it could be explained by different types of work being offered to women vs. men. People hiring for service positions may favour women, and for technical positions may favour men. One of these types of position tends to involve more talking

The study didn't record them at work, the article says, iiuc.

I don't love the way they came up with these numbers. Although it's possible I'm being overly skeptical.

The recording device turns on randomly and captures bursts and then a computer counts how many words were spoken and they estimate the total days count based on that. It amounts to about an hour of recording per day spread out over 17 hours.

I cant see the full paper but from what I can see they don't describe identifying who the speaker is in each recording, so does that mean any word the microphone picks up is attributed to the wearer?

With 5,258 hours or 657 workdays worth of recordings I wouldn't be surprised if they cut this corner given that even at $15/hour they would be spending more than $80k on just the transcription.

So, is it possible falling asleep with the tv on skews the results?

What about being a generally quiet person and living with a yapper?

And more abstractly, is asking "Do you want fries with that" making conversation or are they just doing their job? Should that really count? (no shade, I just don't think our customer service voice is a reflection of our true self)

50 words is smaller than your comment... Do you really only speak this?

I have spent years of my working life interacting almost solely through text and email, so this is believable to me.

If you live and work at home alone and don't order out food or socialize it is entirely possible to go days without speaking a word.

I used to spend entire summers alone as a child walking the forest in my backyard with my dog. I would speak to my parents at dinner but most of my world was quiet.

Speaking in person was very difficult for me as college student and something that I know I will never master because of the lack of verbal communication in my youth.

It's obviously not super common, but it is relatable to me that some people do live this way.

I don't know, I guess me, as a Brazilian, we just speak a lot, so sounds very insane for me!

>on a median day I probably speak about 50 words, and my average must be around 1000.

Why so much variance?

I imagine a lot days they say very little, then maybe they go out with friends or have a presentation or something and speak 10000+ words. My life is pretty similar.

50 words median? Bullshit

What's impossible about that? If he said average, you're right. But back when I lived alone and worked remotely I barely talked in real life, except when hanging out with friends (when it was probably 10k+ words in an evening). I think I honestly only said "hello", "thank you", "by card" etc, when doing errands, and that's all. It's not as ascetic as you think, I type a lot daily, to the point that when talking irl with someone I often say "like you wrote" instead of "like you said". I have a wife now, so that completely changed for me, but I absolutely believe in the 50 word median.

I think that's supposed to be *500

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

Of course they do lol. Boys when given a doll will hit stuff with it. Girls will have a tea party. However, the people who don't have enough social sense to stop talking skew male. Women are generally much better conversational partners.

They needed a study for this? My lovely wife hasn’t stopped talking since the day we met, and we’ve been together 20 years! =D

Yes.

I did not talk to my wife for 3 months...I did not want to interrupt her...

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