Psychology study finds that men are just as ‘chatty’ as women

AUSTIN, Texas – Contrary to long-standing claims by social scientists that women say three times as many words as men, psychology researchers at the University of Texas have determined that men and women speak the same amount each day. \nThe recently published study concluded that both men and women utter about 16,000 words a day. \nThe report was first published in Science Magazine as a collaboration between University of Texas, the University of Arizona in Tucson and Washington University in St. Louis. \nExperimenters used a device called the EAR, or electronically activated recorder. Over the course of an average day, subjects wore the recorder, which turned on automatically, to sample 30-second snippets of conversation every 12 1/2 minutes. Subjects who wore the recorders did not know whether the device was on or off at any particular time. \nRecordings were made of nearly 400 university students in the United States and Mexico, and the sessions lasted as long as 10 days. \n“This new advance has now made it clear that the stereotype of women being more chatty than men can now been relegated to the category of myth,” said Louann Brizendine, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and author of “The Female Brain.” \nThis is the first large-scale study that has systematically recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended periods of time, said James Pennebaker, chair of the University of Texas psychology department and co-author of the report. \n“It’s such a rich research area,” Pennebaker said. “This addresses the whole idea of stereotypes. Everyone was so certain that women talk more than men, but in fact, it’s just a stereotype that’s been around for a long time that is really not true.”