Men do the talking when groups are larger while women speak more in small groups, according to a new study which challenges the stereotype that women are more talkative than men.
Researchers from Northeastern University used so-called "sociometers" - wearable devices roughly the size of smartphones - to collect real-time data about the user's social interactions.
Northeastern University professor David Lazer provided a group of men and women with sociometers and split them in two different social settings for a total of 12 hours.
In the first setting, master's degree candidates were asked to complete an individual project, about which they were free to converse with one another for the duration of a 12-hour day.
In the second setting, employees at a call-center in a major US banking firm wore the sociometers during 12 one-hour lunch breaks with no designated task.
They found that women were only slightly more likely than men to engage in conversations in the lunch-break setting, both in terms of long- and short-duration talks.
In the academic setting, in which conversations likely indicated collaboration around the task, women were much more likely to engage in long conversations than men.
That effect was true for shorter conversations, too, but to a lesser degree. These findings were limited to small groups of talkers. When the groups consisted of six or more participants, it was men who did the most talking.
"In the one setting that is more collaborative we see the women choosing to work together, and when you work together you tend to talk more," said Lazer.
"So it's a very particular scenario that leads to more interactions. The real story here is there's an interplay between the setting and gender which created this difference," Lazer said.
The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
