The study, published in the journal Sex Roles, involved 146 undergraduate students of varying ethnicities in same- or mixed-gender pairs. The students were all assigned both a self-disclosure task, where the goal of the conversation was to facilitate sharing and listening between friends, and a negotiation task, where friends had to make a decision together and make a case for their point of view. The conversations were all video-recorded and analyzed to see if there were any key differences between how men and women tended to communicate—and there sure were. Leaper noted that participants may have been careful about wanting to act cooperative with one another, and in this case, the men may have used fewer directives than usual in their conversations. Women, on the other hand, used more justifications and indirect suggestions. These were comprised of subtle requests for validation (i.e., asking for the other person’s ideas or support before stating her own opinion), which were notably less forceful than the men’s conversation style. On one hand, this could be viewed as unforthcoming or submissive. Alternatively, though, the women’s style of communication could positively affect how well a conversation goes, unlike the male approach, which might be seen as too abrasive. From afar, it might look like men have the better negotiation strategy—after all, they’re being assertive, upfront, and confidently asking for what they want, right? But some past research suggests women could actually have the upper hand, though, because their communication style allows them to get more collaborative, better interpret nonverbal cues, and create more satisfying compromises. “Irrelevant comments suggest that the speaker is not directing attention to the partner’s disclosure,” Leaper speculates in the paper. “Moreover, these kinds of responses may signal some men’s discomfort in dealing with emotionally personal matters. Actively responding to a friend’s personal disclosure may challenge some men’s traditional masculinity norms regarding the expression of vulnerable feelings.” Indeed, past studies have found men are less comfortable with eye contact than women are, perhaps because our culture demands men perform dominance, power, and status, whereas direct eye contact indicates a deeper level of emotion. The results of this study suggest people of all genders can afford to learn how to communicate better in different contexts, finding ways to strike a harmonious balance between attentiveness, nonverbal cues, directness, and space for another person’s ideas, even when they don’t necessarily align with your own.
