Official News - page 12

REAL LIFE NEWS: ANOTHER STEREOTYPE IS EXPLODED

by Hazed

Everyone agrees that women talk more than men, don't they? The stereotype is that men are the strong, silent type while women are chatty and never shut up.

Well if that's what you think, then it turns out you are oh-so-wrong, as the stereotype has been decisively disproved by researchers at the University of Arizona. They bugged 400 students and logged their conversations, and found there was very little difference in word count between the sexes. What turned out to be much more important in determining how chatty somebody is, is whether they are an introvert or an extrovert.

In the study, women spoke a daily average of 16,215 words during their waking hours, and men 15,669 words. The difference of just 500 words is not considered significant - not when there was a huge 45,000 word difference between the most and least talkative people recorded. The most talkative person in the study used 47,000 words, while the least used little more than 500 over a few days.

The researchers admit that their findings may not apply to all men and women, but only to university students - but the results do ring true with other professionals. One relationship psychotherapist who was asked to comment on the study said it agreed with her own experience working with couples. "It's not fair to say men don't talk. Blokes in the pub don't stand around in silence," she said. "The problem is not how much people talk or don't talk, the problem is how well people listen. If women listened more we might find men talked more than we thought, and if men listened they might find that women actually don't talk a lot of rubbish all the time."

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