We’re dealing with a loneliness epidemic and a literacy epidemic at the same time, so there is a bit of unfortunate logic to the news that, according to a team of researchers who published their findings in Perspectives on Psychological Science, the human race has spent two decades slowly whittling down the number of words we are speaking every year.
As the BBC reported, researchers at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the University of Arizona analyzed audio data from 22 studies involving more than 2,000 participants. They weren’t even trying to find this. All of this began as they were attempting to replicate the findings of an old paper on gender differences in talkativeness, but lead authors Dr. Valeria Pfeifer and Prof. Matthias Mehl happened upon a weird and disconcerting pattern: between 2005 and 2019, the average person’s daily spoken word count plummeted from about 16,000 words to 12,700 words.
That’s a 20 percent drop in overall words spoken, or an average of about 338 words that go missing from our mouths every day, totaling about 120,000 fewer words spoken per person every year.
Humans Are Becoming Less Talkative, and a New Study Reveals Just How Much
Modern technology is the easy thing to blame, and it deserves some of the blame. Participants under 25 showed the steepest decline, 452 words unsaid annually, which we can largely attribute to tech reducing how much we have to say to one another. The real problem here is how our society of the past 15 to 20 years has restructured itself around a lack of human contact.
Think about it: if you’re outdoing your Saturday chores, think about how many fewer people you interact with than you used to, now that so many businesses force you to use self-checkout lanes and touchscreen kiosks. Our reliance on tech has engineered humanity out of all the places where we once experienced human contact. As much as GPS can be a lifesaver, it has made it obsolete to ask someone for directions, to the point where, personally, it feels weird when someone asks me for directions. Don’t you have a phone that can do that for you?
The researchers point out that total communication might technically remain stable thanks to all the texting we do; typed words don’t deliver the same emotional punch as a human voice and physical presence in a real-life conversation. We’ve spent 200,000 years feeling accepted as part of a larger community by speaking face-to-face, and in about 15 to 20 years, we’ve seemingly done everything we can to sever the deep, personal connection we’ve built with one another.
Who knows where it goes from here, but so far it seems to be draining us of something we need.
The post Humans Are Using Significantly Fewer Words Than They Did 20 Years Ago, Study Finds appeared first on vice.
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