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January 27, 2012

Strange But True!

Q. “Men may not be from Mars, women may not be from Venus,” to paraphrase the 1990s best seller. But still the way the two genders talk may be worlds apart. How so?

A. Men's style of communication undergirds their relative social power, says David G. Myers in “Social Psychology: Tenth Edition.” In situations where roles aren't rigidly scripted, men tend to be more autocratic, women more democratic. One computer program, which taught itself to recognize gender differences based on word usage and sentence structure, successfully identified the writer's gender in 80 percent of 920 British fiction and nonfiction works (2002). In conversations, men's style reflects their concern for independence, women's for connectedness. Men are more likely to act as powerful people do — talking assertively, interrupting intrusively, touching with the hand, staring more, smiling less; women's influence style tends to be more indirect — less interruptive, more sensitive, more polite.


 
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