Another Symptom of Growing Isolation

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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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