A recent study found that people spoke fewer words a day in 2019 than in 2005.
In Europe in the 1700s, coffeehouses were sources of coffee, but also conversation. As the MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle points out in her 2016 book, Reclaiming Conversation, many people went to coffeehouses specifically to have rich, deep, sometimes even confrontational discussions: She quotes the British essayist and politician Joseph Addison, who wrote in 1714, “I have taken a particular Care never to be of the same Opinion with the Man I conversed with.”
Contrast this with how, some 300 years later, I engage with my local coffeehouse, Starbucks. I open the app at home and order a latte, then whirl my Honda through the drive-through and collect my drink from an employee, who says, “Have a nice day.” No conversation—just caffeine.
This new way of obtaining java is part of why, according to a recent study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, people now are talking less and less. For the study, the psychologists Valeria Pfeifer, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Matthias Mehl, of the University of Arizona, analyzed data from thousands of participants in the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The subjects carried around a device that randomly recorded sound bites of their speech throughout the day. In 2005, when the studies began, the average number of words that each participant spoke in a day was 16,632; in 2019, when the research concluded, the average was 11,900. Each year, the participants spoke about 338 fewer words a day than they did in the previous year, amounting to a decline of about 28 percent over the entire time period.
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From what I can tell, two main reasons seem to be driving this gradual silencing. The first is that conversation requires, at the very least, the presence of another person. But during the study period, people almost everywhere spent more and more time alone—a trend that only accelerated after the study ended, as the pandemic drove millions of people into further isolation. One major paper found that from 2003 to 2019, the portion of free time that Americans spent alone grew from about 44 to about 49 percent—which may sound like a small increase until you consider that the study excludes time spent working, sleeping, and grooming. In 2006, 21 percent of respondents to a survey in 21 European countries said they got together daily with friends; by 2022, the number was just 12 percent.
The other big factor is the rise of digital communication, such as texting and social media, as well as online shopping, ordering, and many, many other -ings. A generation ago, many of the tasks of daily life required conversations: with the grocery-store cashier, the receptionist at the doctor’s office, the host at the neighborhood restaurant. But today, Pfeifer told me, “you can reserve a table using an app as opposed to calling the restaurant.” She added, “The conversations you have with strangers or maybe people that you don’t know as well—the opportunities for those just seem to have declined a lot in recent years.” Opportunities for speaking with people one does know have also declined, as people tend to send a text or DM instead of calling a friend on the phone. (Indeed, when Pfeifer and Mehl analyzed their data by age group, they found that people under the age of 25, who presumably text more because of their well-known aversion to phone calls, had lost even more words a year than those over 25.)
Whatever the reasons for the decline of talking, it could have negative consequences for mental health. Turkle said that, unlike texting or emailing, face-to-face conversation builds empathy: “We experience the emotion of conversation from within our bodies.” In her book, she points to a study in which researchers compared college friends who communicated face-to-face, and by videochat, audio chat, and online instant messaging. “In-person conversation led to the most emotional connection,” she writes, “and online messaging led to the least.”
Even the loss of relatively shallow conversations can be harmful. Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and the author of Once Upon a Stranger, studies “weak ties,” or the people we talk with casually throughout the day. She has found that although these interactions might seem meaningless, they boost our sense of well-being, making us feel part of something bigger, even if we’re just buying milk or chatting with a colleague at the office coffee maker. And when we have fewer of these exchanges, we miss them: A recent study published in the journal Science, for example, found that remote workers spent more time alone each workday and also experienced more mental distress than in-person workers. The effects were especially pronounced if the remote worker also lived solo. Talking less can also create a self-reinforcing cycle. When we don’t practice having small interactions, Sandstrom told me, “then we feel more anxious, and then we don’t want to do it.” But these casual interactions sometimes lead to big, important relationships: “How will I find my best friend that I don’t know that I have if I’m too nervous to talk to people?”
Whatever the reasons for the decline of talking, it could have negative consequences for mental health. Turkle said that, unlike texting or emailing, face-to-face conversation builds empathy: “We experience the emotion of conversation from within our bodies.” In her book, she points to a study in which researchers compared college friends who communicated face-to-face, and by videochat, audio chat, and online instant messaging. “In-person conversation led to the most emotional connection,” she writes, “and online messaging led to the least.”
Even the loss of relatively shallow conversations can be harmful. Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and the author of Once Upon a Stranger, studies “weak ties,” or the people we talk with casually throughout the day. She has found that although these interactions might seem meaningless, they boost our sense of well-being, making us feel part of something bigger, even if we’re just buying milk or chatting with a colleague at the office coffee maker. And when we have fewer of these exchanges, we miss them: A recent study published in the journal Science, for example, found that remote workers spent more time alone each workday and also experienced more mental distress than in-person workers. The effects were especially pronounced if the remote worker also lived solo. Talking less can also create a self-reinforcing cycle. When we don’t practice having small interactions, Sandstrom told me, “then we feel more anxious, and then we don’t want to do it.” But these casual interactions sometimes lead to big, important relationships: “How will I find my best friend that I don’t know that I have if I’m too nervous to talk to people?”
Declines in speech are also a problem, Pfeifer said, because talking exercises the brain differently than texting does. When you have a conversation, your working memory has to retain both what the other person is telling you and what you’re planning to say in response. An in-person discussion is even more complicated: You also have to monitor your body posture and facial expressions so that you react appropriately to what the other person says. When you’re talking face-to-face, you can’t mutter “what the hell” while you type out “sounds great!” Plus, Pfeifer said, in a verbal conversation, you can’t edit or read back what was said, which means you organize your thoughts differently or perhaps try out some ideas you’re not willing to chisel in stone quite yet.
When conversation skills get rusty, other cognitive processes might erode, too, Pfeifer told me. Many people struggle with their attention span, she said, and that could be partly because we don’t have as many chances as we once did to try to follow along as someone tells a lengthy, complicated story. When so much communication happens digitally, she said, “we’re essentially outsourcing a lot of the way our brain works into a device.”
When I use the Starbucks app and similar shortcuts, it’s typically because I don’t want to face the uncomfortable spontaneity of other humans. What if they say something weird—or I do? But, considering this research, I might let more of my own clumsy comments fly and be more receptive to the ones that come my way. I’d rather say something weird, I think, than not say anything at all.
