Chattering sexes
Men are just as prone to gossiping as women, the study finds
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Friday, 06, Jul 2007 12:15
The old adage that women are more likely than men to spend hours chatting has been cast into doubt by a new study.
According to research conducted by American scientists, men talk just as much as women, with both sexes uttering an average of 16,000 words a day.
Psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues placed voice recorders on 396 American college students of both sexes between 1998 and 2004.
The recorders automatically counted the number of words spoken for 30 seconds at 12.5-minute intervals throughout the day and the results were remarkably similar.
And the findings do not appear to be a peculiarly US phenomenon, with studies conducted in Mexico yielding similar results.
Commenting on his team's findings, which were reported in the journal Science, Mr Pennebaker noted how the results appear to debunk the age-old myth that women were far more vocal than their male counterparts.
"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," he said.
The students were fitted with digital voice recorders called electronically activated recorders (EARs) for the study and were not aware when the equipment was recording.