People are talking less, but no one’s quite sure why
20 years ago, there was a theory that women spoke more than men. So the researcher Matthias Mehl and his colleagues strapped listening devices to hundreds of people to test it. They found out the theory was wrong: men and women both spoke about 16,000 words a day.
But recently, Dr. Mehl and his colleagues went back and looked at a bigger pool of recordings over a longer time frame and found that while men and women still speak as much as each other, the overall number of words people speak in a given day has plummeted.
In this episode, Katty Kay speaks with Matthias Mehl — a researcher and professor at the University of Arizona — about why he thinks people are speaking less than they used to, and what it means for society if people are starting to slide into silence.
