By Jim Hagarty
2007
Last week, the results of an important “research paper” showed that women do not talk more than men who yak it up more than was thought to be the case. To arrive at this startling conclusion, researchers bugged a bunch of university students with microphones and sent them out to see how their fellow students behaved on the conversational front. Apparently, the men had as much to say as the women. This, of course, serves to refute the old stereotype of women as incessant talkers.
A couple of other things can be concluded from the results of this study. First, this is proof positive that the world has run out of things to study. Secondly, somebody has scored front-row, first-class tickets on the government research gravy train.
U.S. researchers strapped small digital recorders to some 396 university students split about equally by gender and found that their female subjects spoke an average 16,215 words a day compared with 15,699 for the men. The difference between those two numbers, as reported in the journal Science, is considered statistically insignificant, yet significant enough to warrant reporting in the journal Science.
“The stereotype of female talkativeness is deeply ingrained in Western folklore and (is) often considered a scientific fact,” the paper states. An earlier study had argued women speak almost three times as many words per day as men – 20,000 versus 7,000 – but the authors of this latest paper call this nothing more than a “cultural myth” that grew through wide media circulation.
University of Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl, the paper’s lead author, says there is no difference in how much men and women talk. However, a McMaster University neuroscientist Sandra Witelson argues the U.S. study may have failed to record enough of the students’ conversations to produce an accurate idea of their actual word usage and she has reason to suspect women still might be the more talkative of the sexes.
Now, insubordinate hellion that I am, I want to know when the studies are going to get under way into whether we men actually never do stop to ask for directions, whether we scratch our nether regions more than women and whether we actually love remote controls more than the opposite sex does. Most importantly, do we pass wind as much as our female counterparts. (Tip: If those researchers were to go back over the recordings made by those little recorders they put on all those students and listen to them again, they might find the pass wind question will answer itself).
These, I submit, are equally valid questions to be answered and for a few hundred thousand dollars or so, I’d he more than willing to take a sabbatical to write lots of papers on all these subjects and more.
But if you need more proof that the research cupboard is practically bare, check out this bone from Mother Hubbard’s depleted stock: A new study suggests older adults have a harder time getting jokes as they age. “The research indicates that because older adults may have greater difficulty with cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning and short-term memory, they also have greater difficulty with tests of humour comprehension,” states a newspaper story. “This wasn’t a study about what people find funny. It was a study about whether they get what’s supposed to be funny,” U.S. professor Brian Carpenter says.
In other words, if you don’t think that doing a study to see if women talk more than men or to find out whether or not old people can still laugh are hilarious concepts, then you must he very old indeed and suffering from a severe funny-bone deficiency.
Transplants may soon be an option. I will not be a willing donor, so don’t bother asking. Humour is the only thing keeping me going most days.
