People are talking less than they used to. A lot less.
Between 2005 and 2019, the number of words the average person uttered in a day fell by 28%. That’s according to a recent study from a team of U.S.-based researchers.
“We estimated the difference at about 330 fewer words spoken per day for each year during that time period,” says Matthias Mehl, a professor of social psychology at the University of Arizona. That adds up to roughly 120,000 fewer words spoken during the course of a year, and millions of fewer words spoken during the 15-year study period. “It’s a substantial loss,” he says.
The finding came about when Mehl, working alongside Valeria Pfeifer of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, analyzed audio recordings collected from more than 2,000 people—mostly Americans. Those audio samples, collected randomly as people went about their daily lives, revealed that while the average person uttered about 16,600 words per day back in 2005, that figure had plummeted to below 12,000 words in 2019.
“At first I said, ‘That can’t be right. We need to go back and check the data again,’” Mehl recalls. But after verifying their figures, he and his colleagues discovered that the drop in spoken communication was not only real, but that it had progressed steadily each year for which they had data.
They did not examine the causes of this decline in spoken communication. But Mehl speculates that modern information technologies have played a large role.
Read More: What to Say When Someone Tells You to Smile More
His study analyzed audio samples from people ranging in age from 10 to 94. While the number of spoken words declined among all age groups, the drop was steeper among those under 25. Younger people are more likely than older adults to communicate via text and messaging apps, Mehl says, and a shift toward unspoken, smartphone-aided communication almost certainly contributed to the observed declines.
Social isolation is another likely factor.
Since the early 2000s, surveys on how Americans spend their time have consistently found a marked increase in time spent alone, and also a drop in social engagement. That same period has witnessed a steep rise in remote work and a corresponding decline in workplace collaboration. It stands to reason that if people are spending less time together—both at work and in their free time—then they’re going to say less, Mehl explains.
Another subtler contributor may be the loss of small talk among people in public spaces.
Mehl points out that contactless payments, digital ordering systems, and other technologies that streamline commerce have reduced people’s need to interact with one another. “We can shop for groceries now without talking with a checkout person, and in restaurants we can sometimes order and pay without ever talking with a server,” he says. “All these ways in which we have rendered our daily lives more efficient may have also resulted in rendering our social lives more rudimentary,” he says.
Put all these factors together, and you end up with societies where many forms of spoken human-to-human interaction become increasingly rare. That’s a problem, Mehl says.
When we replace verbal communication with text, we miss out on a lot of the nuance communicated by tone of voice, body language, and other verbal and non-verbal cues. “Text always has a lot of ambiguity,” he says. “We use emojis to reduce that uncertainty, but it’s clear that the facial expressions, the gestures, the prosodic elements of spoken communication—humans are designed to perceive all this as a gestalt, and these elements lend themselves to feelings of belonging and understanding.”
While a decline in idle chitchat among strangers in settings like grocery stores or restaurants may not seem as significant, research shows that, surprisingly, such small talk does a lot for our well-being.
Read More: 8 Phrases That Will Instantly Get Your Doctor’s Attention
“When we have these little interactions, it puts us in a good mood and helps us feel more connected,” says Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex in the U.K.
Sandstrom is the author of a new book, Once Upon a Stranger, which explores the surprising benefits of small talk among unfamiliar people. She says that, historically, researchers in her field have tended to study the importance of close ties and “inner-circle” relationships among good friends and family members. But her work has focused on “outer-circle” interactions among acquaintances, neighbors, and even strangers. Far from being expendable, these impromptu and often fleeting conversations with people we don’t know contributes to our sense of belonging.
“When we have these interactions, they tend to go much better than we thought they would, and we come away from them with a sense that people are generally good,” she says. These seemingly trivial interactions strengthen our sense of community and faith in humanity, she adds.
It’s also true that the more we converse with other people—perhaps especially those with whom we’re not close—the more we feel at ease in other people’s company. “Social skills are a skill like any other,” she says. “If you don’t keep practicing the thing, you lose competency.”
Sandstrom describes herself as an introvert who used to avoid small talk with acquaintances or strangers. But because of her work, she’s learned the power of talking with people she doesn’t know well. “Many of us are shy and socially anxious, and so we need a little nudge to put ourselves in these uncomfortable situations,” she says. “But this is something where the more you do it, the better you get at it and the more you appreciate the benefits.”
The greatest benefit we get from chatting with other people—and the one we may ultimately miss the most if we continue to spend less time talking with one another—is also the hardest to quantify, she says.
“All these little conversations add up to us feeling like people are generally good, I can talk to anybody, and I have a place in this world,” she says. “That’s very hard to measure, but that’s something we all need.”
