Interruptions, Conversational

Dominance Perspective

Conversational interruptions have been framed in two ways in the literature. One view is that interruptions are violations of turn-taking rules. Many people accept that during conversations speakers should take turns and one person should speak at a time. Within this perspective, an interruption breaks these rules and violates another's right to continue speaking. Thus, individuals who interrupt are seen as dominating others.

Considerable evidence was garnered for this argument during the 1970s and 1980s from research on interactions involving individuals who differ in levels of perceived social power. This research showed that more powerful individuals tend to interrupt more often than less influential individuals. For example, doctors tend to interrupt more than patients, and employers tend to interrupt more than employees. In terms of close relationships, research has shown that parents tend to interrupt more than young children, but adolescents tend to interrupt more than their parents. Interpreted from the dominance perspective, this latter finding suggests that as children age, they attempt to gain more power or influence in the family by interrupting their parents.

The most controversial area of research has been the study of conversations between men and women. Early naturalistic studies showed that in cross-gender conversations, men tended to interrupt almost twice as much as did women. This finding was interpreted as confirming the assumption that men hold more social power than women. However, beginning in the 1990s, this conclusion was challenged by critical reviews of previous research, which revealed that whether men or women interrupt depends on the individuals involved and the context of the conversations. For example, in controlled studies in which men and women had equal expertise and social power, men and women initiated equal numbers of interruptions.

Conversational Style Perspective

Interruptions can also be interpreted within the larger social context of conversational behaviors. Interpersonal communication consists of the coordination and interpretation of subtle nonverbal cues, including voice quality, rhythm, volume, patterns of turn taking, and the use of overlapping speech, including interruptions. These nonverbal behaviors provide listeners with cues that signal how a speaker intends his or her words to be interpreted. Habitual use of particular nonverbal cues makes up a person's conversational style. One's particular conversational style depends in part on individual personality characteristics, but also on learning that comes from repeated social experiences. Members of specific cultural or social groups, or even families, learn to use similar patterns of nonverbal cues to signal certain intentions. Thus, individuals from different social backgrounds can have quite different, and often incompatible, conversational styles. If these individuals interact, their utterances can be misinterpreted due to different understandings about the meanings of nonverbal cues. For example, some speakers interject with comments such as “Right” or “I know” while others are speaking. These short utterances can be interpreted as attempts to take over conversations by those who strictly adhere to turn-taking rules or as encouraging listener responses by those who prefer more collaborative conversation. In other words, the former would view these interjections as interruptions, whereas the latter would view them as noninter-ruptive, simultaneous speech.

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