The Decline of Daily Dialogue

"1984 Victory" Postcard

Source: Andy Pitt

A recent article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science with the ominous title Sliding into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year fueled various unsettling headlines by showing that daily conversations have known a steady decline from 2005 to 2018, with people speaking roughly 300 fewer daily words each year, and with an even more pronounced drop in those younger than 25 years. This conclusion was derived from meticulously monitoring recorded audio data from more than 2,000 people, aged 10 to 94, as they went about their daily lives.

However, moving beyond a strictly quantitative approach, should the identified trend of a loss of spoken words every year worry us? What are the consequences for human thought and interaction?

This concern is not entirely novel and not without anticipated dire consequences. It was already foreshadowed by George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which it was programmatic and intentional, central to compiling the Newspeak Dictionary, which would reform the language (and thinking) of the people of Oceania:

We're destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone… It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. […] Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

A loss of the nuances and intricacies of language could annihilate conflict and opposition by making adversarial thinking impossible. However, it is highly unlikely that we are actually witnessing such a systematic endeavor. The decline in spoken conversations appears to be a natural byproduct (or catalyst) of the changes in interpersonal communication we have been witnessing for several decades.

The most obvious explanation, mentioned by the authors, is that the “talking” environment has simply changed from face-to-face to online communication. We are speaking less, but texting more. In a study from 2021, participants in a field experiment were asked to reconnect with an old friend either over the phone or e-mail. Other laboratory participants were invited to “chat” with a stranger over video, voice, or text-based media.

Results indicated that interactions including voice (phone, video chat, and voice chat) created stronger social bonds and no experienced increase in awkwardness, compared with interactions including text (e-mail, text chat). However, a crucial twist was that miscalibrated expectations about awkwardness or connection led to what the authors called “suboptimal preferences for text-based media”. If we expect direct interactions to be “cringe” – a term adopted by generation Z and millennials, as a response to embarrassment or social awkwardness - we can avoid the anticipated social pain by preferring a more indirect environment.

Scene from Komi can't communicate

Source: Manga by Tomohito Oda

This can explain the popularity of the manga series Komi Can't Communicate, which depicts a girl with a non-specific communication disorder, supported by her classmate to make 100 friends and improve her communication skills. In the beginning, the two can only bring themselves to exchange messages by writing them on the blackboard: an easier, less stressful way of interacting than via spoken words. Many teenagers nowadays report preferring text-based environments to face-to-face interactions.

However, texting might not involve us in the act of communication as much as actual voice interaction. A study compared daughters who instant messaged their mothers after undergoing a stressor to those who actually called them. Surprisingly, for the former, their levels of salivary cortisol remained as high as those of control subjects who did not interact with their parents at all. Moreover, their hormonal responses (release of oxytocin) were only present in direct verbal conversation with their mothers, not during text messaging. When looking at the exchanged verbal contents, mothers in the two groups were equally supportive and expressive. The words were not lost or more distant in text-based communication, but they were of a lesser (biological) impact compared to comforting spoken words.

Finally, one hopeful explanation is that what is reduced or eliminated in the impoverished current communication is actually the small talk, and that what remains is more authentic and more profound or meaningful for the speakers. The initial study authors allude to this possibility: “We've lost a lot of small, incidental conversations: asking a cashier for help, getting directions from a stranger, chatting with a neighbor.” Are these lost superficial interactions really significant, and should we regret them?

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A large-scale study in Psychological Science showed that the happiest participants had twice as many genuine conversations and one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants. This inspired behavioral scientists Kristen Berman and Dan Ariely to host a dinner party where small talk was literally banned and only meaningful conversations were allowed, although conversation starters and sample scripts were provided. This allegedly made people feel much happier and more engaged. An alternative explanation is that it might have relieved them from the burden of searching for common ground and offered some out-of-the-box, exotic topics (from suicide prevention to "the art of the dominatrix") that bridged the conversations between a pre-selected group of people brought together by curiosity. But do we always need such fascinating topics to enjoy and benefit from conversations?

Again showcasing an error of anticipation, we might downplay the power (and pleasure) of small talk. In a most recent series of nine experiments involving 1,800 participants, researchers found that people consistently underestimated how interesting and enjoyable conversations about boring topics would be, ranging from talking about World War I to stock market and vegan diets. Across experiments, a clear pattern emerged: people expected the conversations to be fairly dull, but afterward they reported enjoying them much more than they had predicted, even when both parties agreed the topic was indeed boring. Once we start communicating, the power of the interaction might outweigh the importance and relevance of the topic. We just need to get talking, one way or another.

Facebook image: Oscar M Sanchez/Shutterstock