In a society increasingly shaped by self-checkouts, GPS navigation and touchscreen ordering kiosks, new research shows face-to-face conversation may be quietly fading. A new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science suggests that people are losing 338 spoken words every year and have been for at least a decade and a half.
Matthias Mehl, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, has spent his career studying how people communicate in everyday life. When he set out to replicate his landmark 2007 Science paper on gender differences in talkativeness, the results pointed to something he hadn’t gone looking for: a steady, years-long decline in how much people speak each day.
For this study, Mehl collaborated with Valeria Pfeifer, an assistant professor of psychology and counseling at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the study’s first author. Mehl spoke with the University of Arizona News about the accidental discovery, what it means for social connection, and why losing a few hundred words per day each year matters more than it seems.
