Does your girlfriend talk incessantly? Does your mom constantly reiterate things to you? Sure, it's a stereotype that women talk a lot, but not all stereotypes are true. A new study provides more insight toward women's talking behavior.
Professor David Lazer of Northeastern University led a research effort to solve a conflicted topic that has been studied for quite some time. Do women talk more than men? If they do, then why? What causes this behavior? Lazer's study took a different angle in order to provide a more accurate picture of the stereotypical talkative women, instead of merely determining that one sex talks more than the other.
Lazer and his research team gathered 79 college students (42 males and 37 females) and 54 co-located employees (16 males and 38 females) and equipped them with a "sociometer", which is a device the size of a smartphone that collects real-time data about the user's social interactions. The participants were placed in two different settings for 12 hours and the researchers were able to gather all the data they needed through the "sociometer."
The first setting, considered structured and collaborative, consisted of the college students being assigned an individual project for which they were free to converse with one another during the full 12-hour duration. In this setting, the researchers found that women were much more likely to engage in long conversations than men, and it was also true for shorter conversations, but to a lesser degree.
In the second setting, the 54 co-located employees at a call-center in a major U.S. banking firm wore the sociometers during 12 one-hour lunch breaks. No task was assigned, as this environment was considered unstructured and non-collaborative. Here, the researchers found that women were only slightly more likely than men to engage in both long and short conversations. For both settings, when the groups were comprised of six or more people, the men did the most talking. However, these findings are based on situations limited to a small groups of talkers, so further research would need to be conducted to determine behavior in a larger setting.
"In the one setting that is more collaborative we see the women choosing to work together, and when you work together you tend to talk more," said Lazer, in this Northeastern University News article. "So it's a very particular scenario that leads to more interactions. The real story here is there's an interplay between the setting and gender which created this difference."
The study, "Using sociometers to quantify social interaction patterns," was published on Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports.
