We are talking less now than we used to. That’s the finding of a study done by Matthias Mehl, a social psychologist and professor at the University of Arizona. He and a colleague found people are speaking around 340 fewer daily words — and that this has been going on for more than a decade.
Research from 2007 had found that people speak, on average, nearly 16,000 words every day. But this new data showed that number has now dropped to fewer than 13,000 per day.
Mehl joined The Show to talk more about this.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Matthias, what was your reaction when you saw these results?
MATTHIAS MEHL: My response was surprise. So this happened in a very particular context. We were trying to replicate a finding that we had published years before in 2007. In 2007, looking at gender differences, we found that men and women speak on average 16,000 words a day. And so last year, we had an opportunity to replicate that with a much larger sample, a much more heterogeneous sample.
And a postdoc that I was working with at the time, who is now a faculty member herself, Valeria Pfeifer, ran the analysis and she came to my office and said, "Yeah, I have the analysis, I have the findings, here they are." And she shared with me numbers that were around 13,000 words. So I was very surprised and I said, "That’s wrong. That can’t be." And she went back to check and of course they were right, and that’s how it all started. So we were quite surprised to see that we had lost about 3,000 words over over that time span of maybe 14 years.
MARK BRODIE: Also, what does it mean that we are speaking that many fewer words?
MATTHIAS MEHL: If we were to think that, or if we try to calculate how long it takes to speak 300 words, and there’s calculators on the internet, it comes out to about a minute and a half. So that’s really not much, right? But that’s not how it works. Those 300 words or 338 words are really lost across a number of smaller interactions.
So I think the reason this matters and the reason this is quite a bit because every day we have fewer interactions, fewer spontaneous short random here or there conversations, fewer conversations with a neighbor, fewer conversations with a cashier at the grocery store, fewer conversations with a passerby, and I think it’s a real loss of social connection.
And when you do it over the years, so 300 words a year, when you do the math, it comes up out to 120,000 words in a year. And that’s the length of a novel, but again spread out over a large number of conversations.
MARK BRODIE: Ah. So I notice in what you just said, you didn’t mention technology and specifically devices, cellphones, tablets, things like that. Are those playing a role here as well?
MATTHIAS MEHL: I very much think they do. And I believe that that our society has changed, the infrastructure is in a way that that it requires fewer conversations, but in part that is because of the electronic devices. So when I need to find out where to go, I check my Google Maps and I don’t talk to a person anymore. In the same way, we don’t go in the department store anymore, we buy online. And I think that that plays a big role. In addition to that, of course there is all the digital communication like texting and social media that plays a major role as well.
MARK BRODIE: Well, so it’s interesting. So it’s not just the fact that, you know, we have our noses in our phones because we’re texting or scrolling social media, it’s because we can sort of replace conversations with digital activity that, you know, absent the phone, would require you to speak with somebody at the grocery store or at the coffee shop or in the department store or at the library or wherever it is you happen to be.
MATTHIAS MEHL: Exactly. And so we tested this hypothesis. We didn’t have detailed information on how much the participants were using these kind of digital communications, so we had to go with a bad proxy. And the bad proxy was age. Assuming that younger people use more digital communication than older people.
So we split our sample at the age of 25, and so we checked how how we could estimate the loss for the younger adults and for the older adults. And consistent with the idea that the digital communication plays a role, younger adults had a loss of 451 words, so a larger loss, and that makes sense.
But our older adults or older than 25 also lost 314 words. So there’s something that’s really cuts across these different age groups, and so we do think digital communication plays a major role, digitalization of our society, of the way we meet our needs plays a major role, but it’s not just posting on social media.
MARK BRODIE: What do you think it is that we lose when we kind of stop talking to each other to some extent?
MATTHIAS MEHL: I think what we lose really is these these moments of microconnection. So when we text, we are limited to the written word, to the typed word. And the typed word is good. But the typed word always comes with a certain degree of uncertainty.
We see this when we receive a text message and we say, "Was that person serious? Is that person offended? Did I miss something?" And so we try to use emojis. There’s always a certain degree of uncertainty.
In-person conversations, we have the facial expressions, we have the prosodic information through the voice, we have gestures, and we have the words. So humans have evolved to really be very good at reading, "Is this conversation going well? Am I OK?" And I think that leads to to these easier moments of connection with the other person, these microconnections. And I think we see this in in the conversation with a barista that may not last many words, but you’re seen. You feel seen by the other person, you feel noticed, and I think that is the connection that we’re missing out on.
MARK BRODIE: So I want to point out that your data doesn’t go beyond 2019, which means it of course does not include the pandemic, which is a time that it seems like a lot of people at least anecdotally believe that we kind of — many of us anyway — stopped talking to each other and forgot sort of how to interact with each other.
I wonder that if you were to do this study again — like do you think that the data would continue to show that we are continuing to speak fewer words? Like how do you think it would look if you were to try to replicate this study again?
MATTHIAS MEHL: Yeah, this is why I think this was so surprising to us because if this had been after the pandemic that we lose 3,000 words, nobody would probably be surprised. But there’s very little reason to believe that we have reached an upward trend again. As you suggest, people tended to report that after the pandemic they felt socially sluggish, there was hard to find the energy to reach out to people.
So I do think that the trend probably continued, so I don’t know whether we now may be approaching 11,000 words, 10,000 words, somewhere in that ballpark.
MARK BRODIE: Well, what do you think it would take to reverse that? Like what would it take to get us to speak more to each other?
MATTHIAS MEHL: The answer really lies in understanding that that 300 words isn’t really that much. It’s a little bit when we take the equivalent of physical activity. What it takes to counter our sedentary behavior is not running a marathon. It really is putting a little bit more physical activity into our daily life. So taking the stairs instead of the elevator, getting up after an hour of sitting and walking around a little bit. And I think that’s a good parallel that we can draw to social activity. I think a few more words exchanged with people here and there can go a long way.
MARK BRODIE: So maybe something like if you’re at the grocery store, use the checkout person instead of the self-checkout, or look up from your phone when you’re ordering your coffee and say good morning to the to the barista taking order. Like little things like that.
MATTHIAS MEHL: Exactly. That’s actually directly the equivalent of not taking the elevator and taking the stairs is not taking the the self-checkout line. Yeah, I agree.
MARK BRODIE: All right, that is social psychologist Matthias Mehl with the University of Arizona. Matthias, thanks so much.
MATTHIAS MEHL: Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story and headline have been modified to correct the number of words people are speaking daily.
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