We stopped talking, and nobody noticed

0:00Discussion keeps the world turning. This is Round Table. This is Round Table, I'm Steve Hatharly today with Yushan and Yusha. Coming up, add up all the micro conversations you didn't have today. The barista, your neighbor, the colleague you passed in the hall without stopping to say anything. Originally nothing. Collectively though, thousands of words have disappeared, and a new study suggests that that is the new normal. But there's a bit of an uncomfortable part. No one decided that this should happen, so what did we trade away without noticing at all? And is there any reason to want it back? You can find us at Round Table China on Apple Podcasts and don't forget that we love to hear from you. So send us an email or a voice note to Round Table Podcasts at QQ.com. I'll give you that one more time, Round Table Podcasts at QQ.com.

1:01It's a strange thing to think about that humans are using 3,000 plus fewer words a day when compared to the way we used to speak. It's not because we've become suddenly quiet by nature. People didn't suddenly decide to talk anymore, but it has much to do with our lifestyles and the tools that we use in our daily lives. So let's talk about this study and find out what they found. Yeah, well I'll share my personal observation later on, but here it comes with a huge, almost accidental discovery from a psychologist at the University of Arizona. Well, he wasn't really trying to study a decline in talking at all. Actually, he was simply trying to repeat an older study back in 2007 about just how men and women talk. He actually accidentally, while observing the older study, that when new numbers came in with that study, his first reaction was that people are talking less and less words

2:04nowadays. Yeah, so between 2005 and 2019, the average number of words a person speaks per day fell by 28% from around 16,000 words a day down to about 12,700 a day. It's like 3,000 plus. Yeah, we're talking less apparently. And this is not a kind of one-off blip. It is a kind of steady slide. The drop was in sudden or tied to one particular year event. It was consistent year over year decline across the entire 15 year period research. Yeah. It's hard to measure. Is it not? Yeah. How do you literally measure how many words people are speaking or I guess in this case, not using, not speaking at all? You see, the original study was meant, there are 22 actually. The 22 studies were originally meant for study completely different things like coping with breast cancer, how men and women are dealing with illness, and adjusting after

3:07divorce, how people are communicating after a certain big decision is made, and also effects on meditation and just how people are reacting. It's more on the health and medical side of study. While in the meantime, they use some sort of a recording device to record just how many cipits of words is caught up by the machine every day. From there, they accidentally got the results from daily word use. And that's what they say is what makes the findings more convincing, not less convincing, is that these 22 studies were built to study different things. This was not the design at all, as you said, adjusting after divorce, the effects of meditation, that was another one. So the point there is that none of the participants knew that their word counts would ever be compared in that way. So it wasn't on the mind or the minds of the people in the studies.

4:09Oh, they're measuring how many words I'm using. So there's no effect there. So that's why they say that they can look at this as kind of an accurate representation. And they found too that it's not dependent on age. So they did from 10 years old to 94 years old, and it showed up in every single age bracket. So the question is, why? Why is this happening? Yeah. When you were mentioning young people got affected the most, or the number shows the strongest, it kind of makes sense. Or the reason of technology is making people speak less. Self-checkout machines, GPS, instead of asking for directions, ordering food through an app instead, now waiters are always telling you, scan the code, scan the table, scan the code. So all these kind of convenience quietly remove moments where we used to have to talk to another human being. And the doctor, the expert said, we can shop for groceries now without talking with a checkout

5:14person. All these ways in which we have rendered our daily lives more efficient, may have also resulted in rendering our social lives more rudimentary. I've never thought about this before. Outside of our office space, and not in your home, when you're just out, how many words do you think you use a day? Very few, right? Unless answering a phone call? Yeah. There's just no chance for you to speak, it feels. Probably less than a hundred words, because I'm imagining wherever I go, there is kind of a setup or infrastructure or just staffs there. Maybe they're talking you, maybe they're just saying the words that they have to say. But for us, as maybe the customer or just the people that is just going through that area, I was thinking about going to a subway. I don't speak to anybody. Even to a coffee shop, if you go to a coffee shop or to a tea shop, you now just scan,

6:18or if you have the app on your phone, you just order through the app. If you don't have the app on your phone, you just scan the QR code at the shop. You literally don't have to talk to anybody if you don't want to. It's one, I've said this for years, I feel like for our jobs, it's one of the luckiest things that we have is that we have to talk so much, because when we go out into society, we are not really required to speak to anyone at all. Now, they did find, and you mentioned it already, you're assumption was correct, that younger adults are more likely to communicate through texting and messaging apps instead of talking out loud. I guess that lines up with why the decline was steeper, which they did find in younger people than in older adults. But remember, I think we have to remember, too, this study was done in the United States. So this is only looking at American people.

7:19Does any type of study like this ever been done in China, or do you assume that the same results would be found in China? No, that I've heard of, but I believe similar speech studies are done for medical uses, for similar uses like just tracing people's actions or reactions after certain treatment, but not really on the word count. Yeah, the EAR style audio tracking behind the 28% decline hasn't been unreplicated on ordinary Chinese speakers, but Chinese research on everyday speech volumes has focused mostly on the elderly. Teams like Huang Li-Hu's at Tone D University have measured word counts and also information density in the speech of aging adults and Alzheimer's patients. But as Chinese people and the same slide shows up in self report, a November 2020-4 China Youth Daily survey of more than 1,300 respondents found that around 57% experienced incoming

8:22call fear of hesitation. Oh, okay. Fear of answering my phone. Yeah. Oh, do you feel that? Oh, yes. Oh, really? Every time when my phone rings, I'm like, you assume it's bad news. Or I assume I just have to pull it up and talk to someone like an adult. It's sometimes scary. Now you know you're not alone. And then more than 68% set long term reliance on online chatting has degraded their offline social skills. And 53% prefer handling matters online rather than face to face. So self reported, not recorder verified, but remarkably close to what the whole survey says about unused social skills. Well, let me check with you and see if you agree or if you fall into that category. 68% said long term reliance on social or online chatting has degraded offline social skills. That's what you said. Do you fall into that 68%? Do you think? Not specifically like that, but it's just I feel differently when I was speaking to

9:29people or chatting with people online rather than just talking offline. It feels like I have different maybe personalities. If you'd... Oh, that's interesting. You have that just maybe online because you don't have to see another person's face or you don't need to have that kind of feeling of communication. It's just talk and texting. Then you can be a little bit more outgoing online. Oh, so do you think that you have a more aggressive or vibrant personality online than you do? Oh, interesting. You attribute that to just the way that you grew up in the society that you grew up in, everybody's texting, everybody's communicating online all the time. I think anonymity is one thing in here because when you're talking online and from my childhood, I was playing all of these kind of computer games that you can just talk online and a lot of your old trash talk and they can do that just because it is online and anonymous.

10:31You don't know who they are and you don't have to basically not 100% but be responsible for what you just said. For me, there is no such difference. If I'm outgoing, easy going online, then if I meet that person, it's going to be the same. If I'm overly polite to someone while texting, the meeting that person doesn't change that attitude either. For me, it almost doesn't make any difference talking online or offline and you ask the question of do we feel like we fall into the over 60% of people who feel like they're losing their social contacting or speech skills? I felt so before I do what I do now. Previously, it's such a huge pressure for me to talk to someone, especially when it's someone that I don't know a stranger. Like what, for example, what would be... Like paying at a cashier of a convenience store or something like that. That would be stressful. Yeah. Really? I feel awkward and if somebody approached me and talked to me, I would feel like, oh,

11:31wow. Why are you talking to me? But anyhow, so I will respond, of course, but the impact of having to talk to someone, especially strangers, was stronger before than after we do talk shows and speak up more. There's something that I see here in China that I have not seen in other countries and that's the voice notes on WeChat. I've not seen that before. Yeah, I've seen people texting out their messages, but here in China, I see it all the time and I've received a lot of voice notes. Sorry. You're here that. Oh, why do you say sorry to hear that? Because I personally always consider voice notes a type of, you know, it's benefiting just the center and more herself. Well, it's a kind of impolite connotation. Yeah. Nowadays, Chinese communication or workplace. Interesting. Well, the reason I brought it up is because that still counts as using words.

12:35Of course. When you are sending a voice note to someone, it's not exactly the same because you're not having a conversation. Well, I was going to say that. I was going to say you're not having a conversation, but you are kind of having a conversation if they send back a voice note, if it goes back and forth, but it's just not face to face. But what I didn't know is that's considered a little impolite because you are forced to be on this app and listen to this person's voice memo for probably seconds or even some people just sent a 60 second voice message to you and you have to listen to it on this app for the whole minute. Well, there is to be fair, the convert to text button. That we have now, but not previously. Oh, and I use it all the time. I prefer, oh my gosh, what does that say about me? I prefer to read the words from someone rather than hear the voice. Right. Naturally, we all do. But why do we feel like that?

13:35It's like because you are put under a context that's given one directionally by someone who just force you there. Listen to me for the next minute. You are not allowed to know the rest of the text or the whole context about what I'm talking about unless you listen to this full voice message I'm sending, which however long that could be. It's salilically. Yeah. But anyway, people will prefer this kind of non face to face communication online. And I think I also have this kind of habit. I mentioned it, 53% prefer handling matters online rather than face to face. I deliberately want to scan the code on the table in the restaurant, actually. At the beginning of the whole era of people using QR code, I will ask them, is there a like online menu I can see so that I don't have to speak with you? Yes. Really? I just don't like the waiter sitting next to me and wait for me to order. I want my time to actually observe the menu and spend time and take my time to actually

14:39choose and decide which dish I will like. It's really funny. I prefer to talk to the waiter or the waitress. And ask a bunch of questions of what this is made of. What's this? What's that? What's that? Now, what we just talked about and going back to what the researchers found is that they say they admit that it's possible. If you added up the spoken words per day and the typed words per day, there may not have been a decrease. So they're not really including the typed numbers in this particular study. But I want to ask this question too. If this is true, and apparently it is in America, thousands of words are disappearing per day from our conversations. Is there anything wrong with this? If those words are being replaced by text or not being replaced at all, we're just communicating

15:39with people less than we used to, is there anything worrisome about that? That was my initial eyebrow frowning thought when it first read about this article and this research. I was like, we at our current era are walking towards the direction that in the future is going to be non-human serving our coffees in the future. It's going to be a humanoid robot that we're dealing with all the time. So it is a one direction kind of development. We call it development that we're going on to now. It's then, why are we feeling sorry that we're interacting less with people? But I do agree on the fact that losing the skill of chitchatting, of just feeling at ease when you speak to someone, it's more or less a loss. But perhaps that's not something we are eventually going to need in the future, are we? I feel that I've lost the skill of smart talk.

16:41The moment that you meet somebody on the street, I can be just totally frozen and I don't know what to say at the moment. Probably that is the skill when you have a lot of conversation with people. We can talk about, I'm thinking about maybe weather. Have you eaten? That's the way that Chinese people greet. But that's all. I could not figure out any other words or just conversation topics to talk. I ran into you on the street one day. Randomly, do you remember our interaction? It was at a four-way intersection in front of a supermarket and all of a sudden I heard, hey Steve, and I look in there as a ocean. I didn't find you to be awkward in that moment at all. But deep down I was like, okay, now I have to talk to Steve now. Oh, wow. Oh my goodness. Yeah. You're right, you are bad at smart talk. I mean, it's almost the opposite for me. After joining Roundtable and everything I started talking much more, I feel like I'm

17:43better at smart talks with whom, so ever. Yeah, with my elder family members, I can just be more at ease talking about what they're interested, because now I'm more, I'm sharper at developing what people are potentially interested at. So, yeah. I'm curious. Yeah. Anyway, these kind of small interactions are also kind of a practice for a daily life. And then the survey compares social ease to a skill that needs regular use. Social skills are a skill like any other, she says. And if you don't keep practicing the thing, you lose these kind of competencies. Yeah, that's a great point. That's the reason they're called skills, right? Social skills is because you need to keep practicing them or they will kind of disappear. I agree with what you said, you shan, but I'll take it a step further. Yeah, we are headed in this direction now where eventually we're not going to need to speak with anyone, anymore, really.

18:46And I think that's kind of a terrifying thought. So back to the question of, is this worrisome or is it not? Well, I suppose that's a matter of opinion. If you're a naturally shy person who doesn't really enjoy interactions with other people, well, you may be celebrating this news a little bit. But I also think that this is one of the things that makes us a human being is interacting with other people. When we do that, we hear other perspectives. We hear other emotions. We hear other opinions on how we are feeling. So if we're all eventually just going to be asking large language models about how to deal with certain things going on in our lives, rather than asking our friends or our family, well, then I feel like we're losing something that makes us uniquely human. How can we get better at it then? You know, if we're constantly online communicating online and you said it yourself, you shan't,

19:51you feel more comfortable there, you feel perhaps more confident there, which means you're probably going to be leaning towards that option if it's available to you. So if we're headed more and more in that direction, then how are we supposed to sharpen our skills? From now on, I'll just send voice message to you guys. Yeah. You'll have to listen to my 60 second voice message. Judging from that facial expression from Yushan, I wouldn't expect a response. Good luck. For me, the biggest tip will just go ahead, just make the chat. Forget about how potentially awkward it's going to be for you or for the other person. Just chat and then forget about it. So what? It doesn't hurt. And use whatever occasion you might encounter during the day, getting a coffee and just walking down the street, getting on the bus, helping out someone on the road that you see. Just whatever, wherever. That will do it for this edition of Round Table.

20:53Thank you very much for being with us for Yushan. Yushan, I'm Steve Hatherley. We all wish you the very happiest of mid-autumn festivals. And we ask you to join us again next time. Bye-bye.