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.
Here, Mehl digs into 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:
How did this finding come about? Was it something you set out to study?
Not at all. We were replicating an earlier paper on gender differences in how many words men and women speak per day. My collaborator, Valeria Pfeifer, came to me with the word counts from the replication analyses using the same methodology as our 2007 paper, but with 2,200 new participants across 22 studies. Our estimate of daily spoken word average came in at around 12,700 words. Our 2007 estimate had been 15,900. I told her there had to be a mistake. But she rechecked everything, and the number held. Something had genuinely changed.
How did you confirm it was a real trend?
We had 22 studies conducted between 2005 and 2019 with about 2,200 participants in total. When we plotted the daily spoken word counts against the year each study was collected, we found a consistent linear decline. Every year, the estimate of daily spoken words dropped by 338. That is how you get from around 16,000 in 2005 to around 12,700 by 2019. Speaking 338 fewer words every day adds up to more than 120,000 fewer words per year.
What kinds of studies were these? Were they all measuring the same thing?
No, and that’s important. These studies were conducted for entirely different purposes—coping with breast cancer, adjustment after divorce, the social effects of meditation, relationship dynamics. None of them were designed to track how much people talk over time. Participants had no idea their word counts would ever be analyzed this way, which rules out any concern that people adjusted their behavior to fit a hypothesis.
What’s driving the decline in spoken words specifically?
People immediately jump to social media and smartphones, and surely that’s part of it. When we split the sample by age, under 25 versus 25 and older, younger adults showed a steeper decline, about 452 words per year, compared to 314 for older adults. But older adults are declining too, which points to something broader. We’ve lost a lot of small, incidental conversations: asking a cashier for help, getting directions from a stranger, chatting with a neighbor.
Could texting and social media be compensating for the loss in spoken words?
Possibly, in terms of raw output. Total word count across all channels may not have dropped, and it may have even increased. But that is a separate question from whether it leaves us socially whole. Spoken words carry something that typed words often don’t—presence, tone, the spontaneity of a real exchange. Whether people who text more but talk less are socially better off is something the research hasn’t settled. I don’t think we can assume the two are interchangeable.
Does this look different across cultures?
Our samples all came from Western, individualistic societies – mostly the United States, with a few from Europe. We didn’t have data from more collectivistic cultures, so I wouldn’t extend these findings globally. My sense, from observation, is that the kind of casual, incidental interaction we seem to be losing still comes more naturally in other parts of the world. But I can’t say that with data.
Your data ends in 2019. What happened after that?
We don’t have data past 2019, so I can’t say for certain. But I would be surprised if the trend reversed. The pandemic accelerated many of the forces already pulling people socially apart. If we were at around 12,700 words a day going into 2019, I would not bet on things improving from there.
Should people be concerned?
I think so. The US Surgeon General has written about a loneliness epidemic and a loss of social connection. What we may have here is a subtle but objectively measurable signal of that. These 338 words are not one long conversation we stopped having. They are spread across small moments throughout the day—the brief exchange at the checkout, the neighbor you used to run into, the stranger you once asked for directions. Those moments add up, and their absence does too.
Source: University of Arizona
