Reply to comment

30,000 words/day? Yikes. I usually accuse my wife of talking too much; now she's supposed to talk more when she's around our daughter??

That's a good point about the experimental design. Many of these types of observational studies (as opposed to studies where the individuals in the groups can be directly manipulated and controlled) suffer from problems with known and/or unknown confounding factors. In cell and molecular biology it's difficult enough to hold all variables constant except for the experimental variable; research involving socially interacting individuals introduces an entire new level of difficulty.