New Scientist
Image: slightly everything
Silence is golden, but it is not the preserve of men. It seems that verbosity may be governed by personality type, not gender.
James Pennebaker of the University of Texas and his colleagues developed a small device to record snippets of conversation among American and Mexican university students at regular intervals. They then used these recordings to estimate the number of words spoken each day.
The results showed that the stereotype of the strong, silent male is the exception rather than the rule. Far from being tight-lipped, males managed an average of around 16,000 words a day – the same number as female students. However, these figures hide a huge level of variation. Extroverts of both gender jabber their way through more than 24,000 words a day, while introverts limit themselves to 8000 (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1139940).
Pennebaker says the team’s findings shatter the myth that women are more vocal than the men. That belief appeared to gain scientific support a year ago when Louann Brizendine of the University of California in San Francisco published a book that claimed women use 20,000 words a day compared with men’s 7000. She later retracted this claim.
