Interrupting, And What It Signals

Interruption is usually discussed as a matter of manners. It is more accurately a matter of timing conventions, and people raised with different conventions read the same behavior in opposite ways.

Turn-taking runs on very small margins

Speakers exchange turns with gaps measured in fractions of a second, which is faster than a response could be composed after the previous speaker stopped.

This works because listeners predict the end of a turn while it is still in progress, using grammar, intonation and content to anticipate the finish.

Prediction sometimes lands early. A large share of what gets called interruption is an anticipation that arrived slightly before the sentence closed.

Conventions differ about the gap

Some conversational styles treat a small overlap as normal and a pause as a sign that something is wrong. Others treat any overlap as taking the floor.

Both are internally consistent. In the first, jumping in shows attention; in the second, waiting shows respect.

When the two meet, each reads the other unfavorably. The overlapping speaker seems domineering and the pausing speaker seems disengaged, and neither is doing anything unusual by their own standard.

Not all interruptions do the same work

Some overlapping speech supports the speaker: agreement, a supplied word, a short signal that the point landed. It does not attempt to take the turn.

Other interruptions do take the turn, changing the topic or redirecting the point before it has been made.

The two are easy to confuse from outside. Counting interruptions without distinguishing them produces conclusions about a conversation that its participants would not recognize.

Power changes what is permitted

Interruption is tolerated asymmetrically. The same behavior from a senior person and a junior one is read differently by everyone in the room, including the interrupter.

This is why advice to simply speak up is incomplete. The behavior has different costs depending on who performs it.

Recognizing the asymmetry is more useful than denying it, because it identifies which conversational tactics are actually available to a given person in a given room.

What works in a mixed group

Explicitly returning the floor repairs most accidental overlaps: noting that someone was cut off and asking them to finish costs a sentence.

Slightly longer pauses accommodate the people who need them, and are barely noticeable to the people who do not.

In practice the fastest talkers set the pace by default, which means the adjustment has to come from them if the quieter participants are going to say anything.