Men Chatty as Women | Avoid Sloppy Thinking | Facebook Snubbing
Here are a few pointers and thoughts on what I've been reading this week on other blogs and elsewhere.
Women don't talk more than men. New research finds no statistical difference between the amount of words uttered by men and women. Previous research by Louann Brizendine had suggested women speak on average 20,000 words per day while men only speak, on average, 7,000. Wrong! (apparently).
There's loads more on this from the Language Log. 'Not Exactly Rocket Science' has a good write-up.
For me the most interesting thing is the variance between people in general rather than between men and women. They found that amongst the men, three of the most chatty uttered 47,000 in a day, while one man only said 500 words in a day. That is some variance.
The three grades of thinking. Pick the Brain points to a thought-provoking article by William Golding on the three grades of thinking. It's well worth reading Golding's full essay.
The Times (of London) has a piece on the netiquette of sites like Facebook and MySpace:
"Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, said that snubbing people on Facebook differs from real-world snubs because it takes place in a sharply defined moment. "We're used to snubbing people. We don't call them back. We don't answer their holiday postcards. We say we'll meet up with them for a drink when we have no intention of doing so. But here there is a very evident decision moment."
I still have mixed feelings about Facebook and MySpace. On one hand I can see it's useful for networking and keeping in touch. On the other it just looks like a competition to see who has the largest group of (virtual) friends. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I would guess that having too many 'friend requests' is only problematic for people like Stephen Fry (see the article). Disagree? Let me know below...
Anything else from the week's psychology news you'd like to share with other PsyBlog readers? Comment away below.
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As for the three grades of thinking, indeed there is some insight to be gathered from this, in my opinion, but as evidenced by the author of the original post, the trap of distinguishing between "sloppy thinking" and a "sloppy thinker" is an easy egotistical trap to fall into.
I prefer conceptualizing it in the following way: We all, because of the evolutionary adaptive benefits, engage in social thinking; we are hardwired to use schemas and heuristics to facilitate "good enough" thinking. The errors produced from social thinking in more primitive times had less of a impact, given less complex social structures.
As society has become more complex, the impact of the social thinking errors (in the form of stereotypes and prejudices) have increased.
How to reduce this? Develop critical thinking skills, the first of which is the recognition that we ALL, by default, engage in social thinking.
Jeremy, I don't mean to nitpick, but I find your use of the term "research" to describe Brizendine's work a little odd. In this Language Log post, Mark pretty thoroughly demolishes any illusion that any real research went into that statement, demonstrating that the references do not back up her point as she claims.
I'm inclined to agree with dr. grumpus. The proliferation of urban legends, hoaxes, and just-plain-silly chain letters demonstrates this tendency. One critical aspect of our modern world is being able to recognize when we are engaging in social thinking with anonymous sources, as we do so often online. We need critical faculties to evaluate the true source of a message and the trustworthiness of that source. One problem is being able to do that in less time than it took Golding to realize his teachers were frauds.
As far as social networking, this may be slightly OT, but I think it bears a lot more watching and I wouldn't mind seeing more research. Not to sound overly excited, but I get the impression that a lot of (especially young) people are using these services to eliminate geographical barriers in their social circles. I think it's just the beginning, and these are fairly primitive and buggy implementations, but that as time progresses we will see increasing sophistication and social networking software will actually become a powerful tool for social interaction across boundaries. Of course, at the same time, they will be used for silliness, stalking, and advertising too, but all powerful communication media will be so abused.
Dr G, yes, it's about getting off thinking autopilot sometimes.
Will, I take your point about Brizendine's work!
As for social networking, you're definitely making me a little more optimistic. The problem is then I have to really get on one of these networks and put my mouse where my mouth is (if you see what I mean). My excuse has been so far that I've already got a blog...perhaps that's not enough?