CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- With her latest book, "The Argument Culture," communication guru Deborah Tannen may be talking her way onto the best-seller lists. But at the same time, scholars are picking an argument with Tannen's earlier best-seller, "You Just Don't Understand." In it, Tannen has persuaded a lot of people -- including scholars -- that men and women communicate in very different ways. Her "different cultures hypothesis" is based, Tannen repeats throughout her book, not only on her own insight and experience, but also on scholarly literature.
But recently, researchers have been analyzing Tannen's communication, and they have found problems so serious that they now have something to tell her: She just doesn't have the evidence.
"Deborah Tannen has done some questionable things in her citations and use of research literature, and a more careful and thorough review of the research on gender and communication suggests a different set of conclusions," says Daena Goldsmith, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois, who with doctoral student Patricia Fulfs, now at the University of Texas, analyzed Tannen's claims and evidence in "You Just Don't Understand."
Tannen's footnotes, few in number but the foundation of her argument, are the main source of the problem. When you trace them back -to the studies that Tannen bases most of her claims and evidence on, "they say what she says they say but with a lot of qualifiers and a lot of other conditions that shape how you interpret her findings," Goldsmith said.
Tannen's thesis rests "not only on a skewed reading of the scholarly literature," Goldsmith said, "but also on a fairly small set of studies." She and Fulfs found that Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, based her now-famous conclusions on a few "exploratory" studies -- "sometimes involving two people or three couples or one department faculty," Goldsmith said. "And you find that the authors of those studies know that's a limitation of their work, but they say their work allows them to make such claims, but it doesn't allow them -- or anyone else -- to generalize about men and women." Tannen has taken slim evidence and made "huge generalizations," Goldsmith said.
There is another problem. When you look at the studies Tannen doesn't cite, "that are based on larger samples and that use appropriate statistical techniques, you don't find this picture of men and women as dramatically different," Goldsmith said. "You find a picture of men and women as very similar in a lot of ways, and you find a lot of situational variation.
"And so this whole idea that men and women are from different cultures isn't a very good explanation for why the genders communicate differently. If we're from different cultures, why are we the same in some situations?"
Goldsmith and Fulfs call for scholars and policy-makers "to be cautious about relying on this book as a source of empirical generalizations about men's and women's communicative behavior." Their findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of Communication Yearbook.