{"id":53883,"date":"2013-12-28T08:00:58","date_gmt":"2013-12-28T13:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=53883"},"modified":"2015-09-01T21:32:23","modified_gmt":"2015-09-02T02:32:23","slug":"men-and-women-use-uptalk-differently-a-study-of-jeopardy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/12\/28\/men-and-women-use-uptalk-differently-a-study-of-jeopardy\/","title":{"rendered":"Men and Women Use Uptalk Differently: A Study of Jeopardy!"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in. \u00a0Enjoy!<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the big deal about uptalk? In The College of William & Mary\u2019s\u00a0Tom Linneman<\/a>\u00a0took a look at how women and men both use uptalk in his new study,\u00a0\u201cGender in Jeopardy! Intonation Variation on a Television Game Show\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Gender & Society<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The punchline? Women use uptalk more frequently, but men use it as well. For men, however, uptalk signals something\u00a0completely different<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

What is uptalk?<\/p>\n

\u201cUptalk is the use of a rising, questioning intonation when making a statement, which has become quite prevalent in contemporary American speech,\u201d\u00a0explains Linneman. Uptalk in the U.S. is reported to have emerged in the 1980s among adolescent women in California, aka \u201cValley Girls,\u201d and it has become more widely used by men and women since then. Uptalk has been associated with a way of talking that makes women sound less confident.<\/p>\n

Jeopardy! was Linneman\u2019s clever setting for observing how women and men use the speech pattern. The associate professor of sociology analyzed the use of uptalk by carefully coding 5,500 responses from 300 contestants in 100 episodes of the popular game show. He looked at what happened to speech patterns when contestants — from a variety of backgrounds — gave their answers to host Alex Trebek.\u00a0 Although the contestants were asked to phrase their response in the form of a question, they used uptalk just over a third of the time.<\/p>\n

How do men use uptalk?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Linneman found that men use uptalk as a way to signal uncertainty.\u00a0\u00a0 Linneman explained, \u201cOn average, women used uptalk nearly twice as often as men. However, if men responded incorrectly, their intonation betrayed their uncertainty: Their use of uptalk shot up dramatically.\u201d\u00a0 On average, men who answered correctly used uptalk only 27% of the time. Among incorrect responses, men used uptalk 57% of the time.\u00a0 In contrast, a woman who answered correctly used uptalk 48% of the time, nearly as often as an incorrect man.<\/p>\n

Men\u2019s uptalk increased when they were less confident, and also when they were correcting women \u2014 but not men. When a man corrected another man \u2014 that is, following a man\u2019s incorrect answer with a correct one \u2014 he used uptalk 22% of the time. When a man corrected another woman, though, he used uptalk 53% of the time. Linneman speculates that men are engaging in a kind of chivalry: men can be blunt with another man in public, but feel obliged to use a softer edge with a woman.<\/p>\n

How do women use uptalk?<\/em><\/p>\n

As Linneman explains, \u201cOne of the most interesting findings coming out of the project is that success has an opposite effect on men and women on the show.\u201d\u00a0 Linneman measured success in two ways: He compared challengers to returning champions, and he tracked how far ahead or behind contestants were when they responded.\u00a0 Linneman found that, \u201cThe more successful a man is on the show, the\u00a0less<\/em>\u00a0he uses uptalk. The opposite is true for women\u2026 the more successful a woman is on the show, the\u00a0more<\/em>\u00a0she uses uptalk.\u201d Linneman suspects that this is \u201cbecause women continue to feel they must apologize for their success.\u201d<\/p>\n

Probabilities of Uptalk by Certainty, Age, Race, and Gender<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Screenshot_17\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Virginia Rutter<\/a> is a\u00a0professor of sociology at Framingham State University. \u00a0She is the author, with Pepper Schwartz, of\u00a0<\/em>The Gender of Sexuality<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The Love Test<\/a>. \u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and at Girl w\/Pen<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in. \u00a0Enjoy! What\u2019s the big deal about uptalk? In The College of William & Mary\u2019s\u00a0Tom Linneman\u00a0took a look at how women and men both use uptalk in his new study,\u00a0\u201cGender in Jeopardy! Intonation Variation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":60837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[349,23384,329,55,23677,778,285,293],"class_list":["post-53883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ageaging","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-emotion","tag-gender","tag-gender-doing-gender","tag-intersectionality","tag-raceethnicity","tag-social-construction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/12\/128.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53883"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67804,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53883\/revisions\/67804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}