Last week, a specific news story made the ‘usual rounds’ on the blogs as well as the traditional media. There are dozens of examples of it; here’s NPR’s take. The gist is that, according to a specific study, males speak close to as many words a day as females do, shattering the preconceived notion of women being chatterboxes. Continuing yesterday’s theme of misleading statistics, here’s a counterpoint to the well-received study.
First and foremost, I must link to The Princeton Review’s podcast series, LSAT Logic In Everyday Life. On its latest episode, it delved into this topic in some detail (mp3). No, I don’t plan on taking the LSAT anytime soon. I just enjoy the logical processes employed within the podcast.
In the show, Andrew Brody makes a basic argument: is the myth that women talk more daily shattered or only explored? Again, we have another statistical problem. To quote NPR:
Researchers outfitted 396 college students — 345 Americans and 51 Mexicans — with devices that automatically recorded them every 12 1/2 minutes, which amounts to 4 percent of a person’s daily utterances.
The researches only studied college students. Brody’s point is that there might be something in the lifestyles of college students that makes both sexes speak near the same amount. In other words, it would have been nice if the study had used men and women of another profession and age group to bolster its ‘conclusion’.
The lesson cliché here is to take everything with a grain of salt. And for the record, my bet was on men speaking more, actually. Go figure.
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