Why Are We Talking Less, and Why Is That Bad for Us?
We live in an age of verbal cacophony. Podcasts, social networks and AI-generated content flood us from every direction and create the sense that everyone is talking all the time. But a new, headline-grabbing study makes clear that the opposite is true, humans are talking less and less. More precisely, over 14 years, the average volume of speech has been cut by 28%. If in 2005 the average American spoke 16,600 words a day, by 2009 that figure had fallen to just 12,000 words. And estimates are that since then, under the influence of COVID, the rise of artificial intelligence and social changes, the situation has only worsened further.
"This loss of words reflects real spoken conversations, large and small alike, that we simply stopped having with other people," write the researchers, Prof. Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona and Dr. Valeria Pfeifer of the University of Missouri, in their article, "Sliding into Silence?", published in March in the journal of the American Psychological Association, APA. "What we are seeing here is a subtle sign of the loneliness epidemic and the loss of social connection, which the US Surgeon General warned about in a special 2023 report," Mehl now says in an interview with Calcalist Magazine. "The hundreds of words a day we lost each year are not one long conversation we stopped having. They are scattered across small moments during the day, the brief exchanges at the supermarket checkout, the neighbor you used to run into by chance, the stranger you would once have asked for directions. Those small moments add up, and so does their absence."
"What is really worrying is that we can already see the bottom," Pfeifer adds. "We have already lost 28% of our conversations, and if we do not stop the trend, we may become a society that talks very little. The less we communicate and the fewer people we meet, the more we lose our sense of belonging to society. In addition, there may also be cognitive consequences, such as a shorter attention span or a decline in memory, because we are no longer engaging as much in the relatively complex tasks that face-to-face conversation requires. We are already approaching a point where it will be harder to recover, and COVID unquestionably accelerated this trend."
What are you basing that on? "It is already visible in the younger generation: teenagers today struggle more with small talk and casual conversation. They walk around with headphones, sometimes to signal to their surroundings that they do not want to be spoken to. But I also think they really do struggle more with those interactions, with feeling comfortable in an environment where they need to talk to people, with sustaining attention for long periods and with self-regulation."
Self-regulation? "Yes. When you are talking to someone, you need to be engaged, you cannot simply run away from the conversation. For example, if you were to say something to me right now that I really did not like hearing, I would still have to keep my cool and keep talking to you. I cannot just scream, run away or switch you off, I have to regulate myself. That ability develops through conversations, and if we do not practice it, we lose it, or in the case of young people, they never develop it at all. And that could change the way society functions and the way we meet in public space."
Chatting with the cashier for all our sakes
The Mehl and Pfeifer study was born by accident. Before them, no one had examined the verbal retreat in the public sphere, and they themselves did not intend to do so, they only wanted to reproduce the results of the study that brought Mehl to prominence in 2007, a study that shattered the myth that women talk more than men and proved that men and women speak the same number of words per day on average. But in the new experiment, results emerged that stunned Mehl so much that he was sure there had to be a mistake: gender equality held, but the overall numbers had dropped dramatically.
"When I presented the statistical analyses to Matthias, he said, 'Wait, that's a lower estimate than the one we had before. You must have made a mistake,'" Pfeifer says. "So we checked everything again, reran all the analyses, and it turned out my calculation was correct. Matthias asked, 'Does that mean we are talking less?' So we built a model that examined exactly that, and indeed, that is what we found."
The study was based on recordings collected from 2,200 participants, most of them Americans. "All the participants used a device called EAR, Electronic Activated Recorder," Pfeifer explains. "Today it is usually a smartphone app, and in the past it was a small physical recording device that people wore on them. The device randomly records 30-second audio samples five times an hour, and follows the subject throughout the day for 2 to 9 days. Based on this information, it is possible to estimate how many words the subject says on average per day."
The automatic assumption is that the loss of spoken words is tied to technological changes: we text, email and comment on social networks, and therefore we talk less. Mehl and Pfeifer agree that there is a connection, but believe the problem is much broader. "We used the participants' age as an indirect measure," Pfeifer says. "We assumed that younger people rely on smartphones more than older people, and indeed we found that they are losing words at a faster rate, about 450 words a day on average for each year of the study, compared with older adults, who lost about 300 words a day. So we estimate that some of the words that used to be spoken aloud are now being written in messages. But that is not all."
Meaning? "It is true that some of our conversations have simply moved into smartphone texts, but there are also conversations that have simply disappeared: we use apps instead of conversations to navigate while traveling, order deliveries or make appointments, and we use self-checkout instead of a cashier."
And that is bad? It is progress, after all. "The tendency is to talk about these changes in terms of efficiency: it is faster, and it saves on worker costs that can be passed on to lower prices. But in practice, there is a price. It deprives us of social interactions that may benefit us, and we do not always notice it."
Why should I prefer meaningless small talk with a cashier or gas station attendant over a practical written exchange? "Spoken conversation is richer than written conversation, it includes facial expressions, tone of voice, body gestures. You have to stay engaged in it all the time, and balance what the other person says against what you say. It is an ongoing process of coordination and reciprocity, which does not exist in written conversation."
"There are studies showing that the connections we build through spoken conversations are stronger than the connections formed through written conversations. And if we stop using the 'small' version of this behavior, we may also lose the 'big' and more important version of it. We are already living in a loneliness epidemic. People feel lonelier, there are very high rates of depression and anxiety, and I think the fact that we no longer communicate the way we used to may be linked to these phenomena."
Photo: Courtesy of The University of Arizona Prof. Matthias Mehl, "The decline in speech volume is a subtle sign of the loneliness epidemic and the loss of social connection, which the US Surgeon General warned about in a special 2023 report"
Photo: Derrick Benitz Dr. Valeria Pfeifer, "We talk about technological changes in terms of efficiency, it is faster, it saves costs. But they also come at a price because they deprive us of social interactions that may benefit us"
These are not routine conclusions, certainly not for Mehl, who in 2010 published a widely discussed study showing that people who spent more time in meaningful conversations and less time in small talk were happier than everyone else. More than that, the happiest person in the study was the one whose share of small talk in speech was the lowest, 10%, while the unhappiest person spent nearly 30% of their speaking time on small talk.
Matthias, in your 2010 paper you directly linked quality of life to less small talk and more meaningful conversations. In the current paper you argue that a reduction in speech of any kind is a negative trend. Explain the contradiction. Can it not be said that the absence of small talk simply frees up time for more meaningful conversations? "That is a fair point. However, the small talk effect was not replicated in the replication study we did, whereas the effect of the amount of time people spend in conversation and of more substantive conversations was replicated. Based on the replication findings, I tend to think of small talk like an inactive ingredient in medicine. It has no effect on its own, but it is necessary to carry the active ingredient, which is conversations that go a little beyond the most minimal interactions in general."
These findings connect with another recent study, published in April in the APA journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which undermines the idea that any topic of conversation is boring. Researchers from the University of Michigan, Cornell University and INSEAD in Paris asked 1,800 study participants to rate their level of interest in ten topics, sports, film, social networks, artificial intelligence, music, travel, history, environmental protection, literature and fitness, and then paired them so that a given topic would be very interesting for one person and very boring for another. Again and again, participants enjoyed conversations they assumed would bore them more than they expected. The pattern repeated in online and face-to-face conversations, with strangers and with friends, in conversations based on topics brought by the participants and in conversations on topics assigned by the researchers. The study's conclusion is that it is human connection, not the topic of conversation, that creates enjoyment.
Photo: Stuart Robinson, University of Sussex Dr. Jillian Sandstrom, "When we do not attach importance to interaction with a service provider, we dehumanize them, and that underlies many of the problems in the world. We lose touch with the common humanity we all share"
The cure, 3 more minutes of conversation a day
How do we save humanity from sliding into silence? The remedy offered by Mehl and Pfeifer is simple: "Speaking 300 additional words a day could give every person a simple but meaningful way to reduce their personal sense of isolation, and thereby also affect the ongoing loneliness epidemic from which our society suffers," they write at the end of the paper. 300 words require very little effort: for an average speaker, it takes 2 to 3 minutes to say them. And no, they do not have to be used for lofty matters.
"300 words a day could be a short hallway conversation with a neighbor, a colleague or even a complete stranger. A joke told to loved ones. A slightly more detailed answer to the question, 'How was your day?'" write Mehl and Pfeifer. According to psychologist Dr. Jillian Sandstrom of the University of Sussex in Britain, it is even important that the conversations we add to our daily routine be 'trivial' conversations. In her book, "Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How 'Small' Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life," released in March by HarperCollins, she brings together more than a decade of research she conducted on the importance of minimal social interactions, from words of courtesy or a smile to conversations with strangers, and the conclusion that emerges from all of them is that there is no such thing as an unimportant conversation. Every interpersonal interaction matters not only for us and for the person we spoke with, but for human society as a whole.
For example, in one of her studies she divided café customers into two groups: one group was asked to have a short, friendly conversation with the barista, make eye contact, smile and exchange a few words, while the other was instructed to be as efficient as possible, order, pay and take the coffee without unnecessary conversation. "When the participants left with their coffee we asked them to fill out a short questionnaire," she says, "and the findings showed that the people who had the social interaction were in a better mood, felt more connected to others and were more satisfied with the coffee-buying experience."
Why is it so important to create interactions with strangers? "When we do not attach importance to interaction with a certain person, we are essentially dehumanizing them, and that underlies many of the problems we see in the world today. We simply lose touch with other people and with our shared humanity. It is easier to dehumanize when those small interactions are no longer there, the barista at the café is no longer seen as a person, but only as the means by which you get your coffee. We do not even make eye contact because we are absorbed in the phone, so the interaction is reduced to the bare minimum.
"I cannot count the number of times I looked someone in the eye and asked, 'How is your day going?', and their response was, 'Wow, no one ever asks me that.' And what they were really saying was, 'No one notices me,' 'No one really sees me.'"
What did you think of Mehl and Pfeifer's study results? "They mainly made me feel sad and worried. It is a warning light that reflects what we already feel, that so much of life is moving online. And that is hard, because technology makes things more efficient, and that is great, but what are we doing with that time? What are we using it for?"
Using it for the people dear to us? "We have this general notion that interactions with the people closest to us are what really matters, and of course they matter very much, but we greatly underestimate the value of all the other, smaller interactions. For example, there are studies showing that people who regularly interact with shopkeepers, bus drivers and the like tend to report higher life satisfaction."
That sounds strange to me. Most people I know will do a lot to avoid unnecessary conversations. "Yes, but avoiding speaking with strangers can harm our social skills. At first they rust a little, then a little more, and a little more, until people feel they have no social skills at all. We know in theory that the same is true of loneliness, there is a very similar vicious circle, where people start thinking others do not like them, then they behave in ways that make others respond differently, and so on."
But we still shy away from talking to strangers because we do not know how they will react, or because we fear rejection. What do you do? "All those fears are wrong. I have done a lot of studies in which I asked people, 'In a few minutes you are going to have a conversation with a stranger. How do you think it will go?', and then I had them actually have the conversation. When I asked them afterward, 'How was it really?', it consistently went much better than they had imagined, and not just a little. People are simply completely wrong in their perceptions about conversations with strangers."
Give me another example. "There is a concept called the 'liking gap': after two people talk to each other for the first time, each one says they liked the other person, but they do not believe the other person liked them to the same extent. It has to do with that critical voice we have in our heads, we think we did not do a good enough job, that we did not tell the best story, that we should have said something else, or should not have said something specific. We focus on all the negative things, while the other person is probably just thinking to themselves, 'I just talked to a stranger, and it was actually fine.' They are simply happy."
What is the solution to these fears? "Just do it. Talk to strangers! It sounds like crazy advice, and I know people are anxious about it, but human beings have a basic need to belong, to feel accepted, valued and connected to others, so in the end we all benefit from social interactions. Not all of us want the same amount, introverts want less, extroverts want more, but almost everyone feels better after social interaction."
How do strangers react when you suddenly start talking to them? I understand the British are polite, but are they also cooperative? Do they take it well? "Yes. I was involved in a large project together with BBC Radio 4 called The Kindness Test. We asked more than 60,000 people, 'What was the last kind act someone did for you?', and in about 10% of the cases it came from a complete stranger. Sometimes it was someone helping carry a heavy load, or a driver on the road letting someone merge, but there were also compliments, smiles, random conversation, a hug here and there. People appreciate these things. We worry they will be awkward, but in practice they are appreciated far more than we imagine."
