The ‘Gen Z stare’ — and the decline of saying things out loud

It's become a familiar TikTok trope.

A millennial walks into a coffee shop and tries to order something. There are countless iterations, but the basic dynamic is the same: The cashier responds with a gawp, says as little as possible and points to a sign. Another question; another point. One more question. Point. Eye roll.

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Like most good generational jokes, poking fun at the now-infamous "Gen Z stare" - a silent, blank expression - works because it gets at something real: We are, quite literally, talking less.

An analysis published in July in Perspectives on Psychological Science of more than 2,000 people found that Americans and people in several other countries are speaking roughly 300 fewer words a day, or about two to three minutes' worth, with each passing year. The drop - a 28 percent decline from 2005 to 2019 - was especially pronounced among people younger than 25.

The finding raises an obvious question about the influence of smartphones, texting, remote work and other technologies that have allowed us to conduct more of daily life without opening our mouths.

Valeria Pfeifer, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of psychology and counseling at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, came to the finding by accident. She was studying gender differences in speech when she noticed something unexpected in the data: People seemed to be talking less. Curious, she went back to see whether the pattern held - and how much had changed. Only when she looked across the full 14-year span did the scale of the lost words became apparent.

"Once that insight came, it was a big and alarming observation," Pfeifer said.

For most of human history, speaking was not merely one way to communicate. It was the default. You could write a letter, perhaps. But buying something, finding your way around, meeting a stranger, working alongside someone or maintaining a friendship generally required oral conversation.

Now speech is becoming, in many corners of life, optional.

Scientists have long treated changes in speech as a window into the brain. Language difficulties are common in dementia and other neurological disorders. Some patients struggle to retrieve words or express themselves; others have trouble understanding what is said to them. This relationship is usually understood in one direction: The brain changes, and speech changes with it.

But the causal arrow may be messier than that.

Conversations and cognition

Speaking is itself a complicated neurological act.

Producing even an ordinary sentence requires the brain to retrieve words, organize them, coordinate muscles, interpret another person's response and formulate what comes next - all in a fraction of a second. Regions in our brains, including Broca's area in the left hemisphere, play important roles in speech production and articulation.

That raises a provocative possibility. If conversation repeatedly recruits these systems, could talking itself function as a modest form of cognitive exercise? And if so, what happens when people do less of it?

The question is difficult to separate from another change in American life. We are not simply talking less; in many ways, we are spending less time together. Decades of research have linked social connection and cognitive stimulation to better health, while isolation has been associated with worse outcomes.

None of this means that ordering from a touch screen will give someone dementia. But a society-wide decline in ordinary conversation could be one piece of a much larger transformation in how often we exercise our brains by interacting with other people.

Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist whose 2000 book "Bowling Alone" chronicled the collapse of American civic participation, sees the decline in spoken interaction as part of a long-standing, broader retreat from face-to-face life. Americans began withdrawing from clubs, churches, neighborhood organizations and other forms of communal participation in the 1960s shortly after TV took off but decades before smartphones arrived. Digital life may be accelerating a process already well underway.

"In some sense, that's the most disturbing thing - that it's still declining," Putnam told me. "It seems impossible to turn that trend around."

For years, the consequences of that retreat have mostly been discussed in social terms: loneliness, polarization, fraying communities, fewer friendships. But if conversation is not simply a means of transmitting information - if it is also a demanding cognitive activity - then its disappearance raises a different set of questions.

Calvin Newport, a Georgetown University professor who writes about the impact of tech on society, said he believes people are talking less because in-person or voice interactions can be hard. But that's the point of it, he said.

"The problem is that our social brains equate sacrificing time and attention on behalf of someone else as the key sign of an important connection. So, when we make socializing easier, we paradoxically feel less connected and social," Newport said.

Gen Z appears to have been especially affected, prompting speculation that the pandemic may be partly to blame: Many young people missed critical years of in-person socialization while attending school virtually during covid-19 lockdowns. On social media, interpretations of the Gen Z stare vary. Some see it as rude, or as evidence of an aversion to small talk. Others describe it more sympathetically, as a deer-in-the-headlights response from young people who feel anxious or unsure of how to respond.

Talking vs. texting

The strange thing about the decline of conversation is that almost no individual instance of it feels like a loss. The kiosk is faster. The app is easier. The text is less awkward. Each innovation saves us a few words.

Only in aggregate do we begin to wonder what all those unsaid words were doing for us.

Pfeifer's study drew on audio recordings from 22 different studies, in which participants carried devices for several days as they went about their daily lives.

In the months since making the discovery, Pfeifer has found herself thinking more about how often she talks - and about what might be lost when conversation is replaced by text. What interests her most is the difference between communicating asynchronously and talking to someone in real time.

A live conversation places particular demands on working memory and attention. You have to keep track of what another person has said, decide how to respond and listen as you formulate what comes next. Texting and email relieve some of that pressure. A message can be considered, revised and re-revised before it is sent; the conversation itself remains on the screen, eliminating much of the need to remember what came before.

Pfeifer suspects that any decline in speech may have less to do with conversations among close friends and family than with the disappearance of smaller, more incidental exchanges mostly with strangers. A burger can be ordered from a kiosk. Google can give directions. ChatGPT can help settle debates about facts such as who was the actor in a certain movie. Each innovation eliminates an interaction that once might have required talking to another person.

"I grew up where, if you are walking the street and a stranger comes towards you, you have to greet them," said Pfeifer, who is now 37 and from a rural area in northern Germany. "I feel like norms are starting to shift towards the polite thing is not to talk to somebody."

Yet research suggests that talking to strangers - even when it feels awkward - tends to make people happier and more connected than they expect, and spoken conversation creates a stronger sense of connection than texting.

Lately, she has been trying to counter her own loss of words. On a recent trip to the airport in Charlotte, on her way home from a work trip, Pfeifer remarked to her driver that it was a beautiful morning. The comment turned into a conversation about where she was headed and about the driver's cousin, who was starting school in St. Louis. On the plane, a comment about the blanket her seatmate brought aboard led her to learn that her seatmate was taking her first flight. Even an exchange at Starbucks at home in Kansas City about whether a drink should be hot or cold became a conversation about the different defaults people expect in different places.

None of these conversations were especially consequential. But the small exchanges provided opportunities to exercise the social and cognitive skills that connecting with another human requires.

"I think these small acts can go a long way to develop more confidence in talking with each other again," Pfeifer said.

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