Are women really more talkative than men? The fair sex does indeed talk more than men, but only when it comes to business (for example, working on a common project). In ordinary small talk, women are only slightly more verbose than men.
The stereotype of female talkativeness has long wandered from joke to joke and remains a favorite target of humorous programs. Psychologists at Northeastern University in Boston (USA) decided to check how true this idea is.
They were interested not only in how much time men and women spend in conversations, but also in how rich and substantive these conversations were.
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To do this, they distributed special sociometer devices to the study participants, which were supposed to track the frequency of contacts and the length of conversations, as well as the topics discussed. In one case, participants were given the task of preparing an individual project, which they were allowed to discuss with others. In another, they were tested during lunch breaks. The results showed that, on average, women spent more time talking. But if during the breaks they communicated only slightly more actively than men, then in the process of working on the project they often started long discussions and entered into disputes*.
“We often evaluate the behavior of other people without paying attention to the context,” said David Lazer, one of the authors of the study. – In our study, women showed a greater propensity to cooperate, they actively shared their thoughts in the process of work than men. When we cooperate with each other, we always have something to discuss.”
* Scientific Reports, 2014, vol. 4.