Research Book: Summary of the book so far Part 3

Throughout the book, Tannen talks about how men listen and speak in the language of independence and status while women listen and speak in the language of intimacy and connection. In this part of the book, she goes into detail about the role that these two "genderlects" play when it comes to lecturing and explaining things.

She cites this experiment conduced by another linguist where he paired men and women together to talk about Children and violence on TV. In some groups, it is one man with another man. In others, it was a woman with another woman. Finally, the third set of groups were made of one man and one woman. Also, before the experiment started, half of the people were given material about the topic to read in order to become the "expert" of their pair. At the end of the experiment, he found that in most groups, the "experts" talked the most, the men who were experts talked more. Another surprising result he found was that in the cases where the woman is the expert and the man was not, the woman almost always seemed to play down her expertise and the man would almost resent the fact that she is the expert. The theory here is that in lectures, men think that being the listener mean being inferior and being the lecturer means being superior. As a result, they would try to argue and debate for the status.

Another interesting part of this book is when Tannen analyzes the times when people respond with "yeah." She says that women say that word when they follow and men use it when they agree. This could cause conflicts because when a man hears that from a woman who in the end does not agree with him, he might think that she was only agreeing but not listening to him. On the other side, when a woman does not hear a man say "yeah," she thinks that he is not listening to her at all because she assumed that saying "yeah" means that someone is following what she said.

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As of now, I am looking forward to reading the chapter on Interrupting, because that also seems to be a very big cause for major conflicts between men and women.