So Much for the Motormouth Myth

Posted on Jul 6, 2007

lajerga.com

Chatty gents and stoic gals can now rejoice as the scientific community validates their existence.

Finally, a gender-focused study that doesn’t fall prey to the hidden gender biases of its research team (a phenomenon that occurs all too frequently in concordance with a little-known, but often operative, adjunct to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).

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Los Angeles Times:

It turns out that women and men talk about the same amount—about 16,000 words a day, or 11 words a minute, researchers reported [Friday] in the journal Science.

“This [notion that women talk more than men] was one of these urban myths,” said senior author James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “No one knows where this belief even came from, but it’s been reported for years.”

Upon reading that women are thought to speak 20,000 words a day, and men a mere 7,000, Pennebaker and his colleagues set out to discover the truth.

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