Communication Style

Deborah Tannen (1990) writes on conflicts that she asserts stem from gender differences in conversational styles. She asserts that men cannot understand women, and women cannot understand men.

Tannen makes much of her case by self-serving interpretation of small incidents. For example, she interprets men waving women ahead of them in traffic as “communicating” male dominance and female submissiveness. In fact, men wave both men and women ahead, and women do the same. Both cut each other off without checking the sex of the driver. Most of the time, they do neither, changing lanes based on safety and the rules of the road rather than the sex of other drivers. When they do otherwise, it is more likely that they are in a hurry rather than “asserting dominance.”

Tannen claims that American men get right to the heart of a matter in a conversation because they have not learned to engage in “chit-chat” the way women have. Although probably not the term men would use, Tannen apparently has not spent much time listening to men in a bar “chit-chatting” about sports and women.

Tannen claims that American men left home to find work and to open the frontier, so became independent and left the responsibility for socializing to women. Socializing is a responsibility? The three groups closest to Tannen’s model were fur trappers, cowboys and miners. The fur trappers often married Indian women. The “wild west” of the cowboy lasted only about twenty years before the railroad brought law, stability—and women. The mining era lasted longer, but the towns quickly went bust or became civilized. The three groups together represent a tiny percent of American men for a brief period in US history. The actual experience of most pioneers was a lot closer to the family struggles described by Laura Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie.

Tannen also claims that communication differences develop because boys and girls grow up separately. Boys and girls may play separately, but they are together in school and in family units. If they learn separate styles when apart, why can’t they learn common styles when together? Tannen ignores mutually comprehensible male-female conversations, almost certainly the vast majority, and she does not recognize that the exceptions she mentions falsify her own conclusions.

Tannen attempts a cross-cultural spin by asserting without evidence that communication style caused the divorce of a Greek man and American woman. Even worse, she generalizes from the single case to all cross-cultural marriages, a ludicrous over-extrapolation.

Just as people often “prove” a point by some folk saying (Nearest is dearest, A stitch in time saves nine) but could just as easily “prove” the opposite (Distance makes the heart grow fonder, Haste makes waste), Tannen relies on anecdotes with equally plausible alternative interpretations. For each anecdote of conflict stemming from misunderstanding that she cites there are millions of successful conversations between men and women, not to mention plenty of instances of misunderstanding between men or between women.

Tannen’s work is typical of the way “pop psych” authors make their case. Facts taken out of context are interpreted to support the theory. Anecdotes are heaped up. Unusual cases are characterized as typical. Exceptions are ignored or dismissed. Possibility rather than probability is considered convincing proof of preferred ideas, while certainty is demanded for opposing ones. As Michael Crichton (15 September 2003) speaking in San Francisco said:

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the Information Age it takes on a special urgency and importance. We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real. Our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears [emphasis added].

Men and women may find themselves in conflict, but it is unlikely that sex-specific communication style is the cause, at least not based on the flimsy evidence presented by Tannen. Even if such forms exist, there must be a third form used when they talk to one another, as the simple fact is that despite occasional misunderstandings, men and women understand one another most of the time.