The science behind interrupting: gender, nationality and power, and the roles they play
Those annoying chatterboxes who interrupt when we are in full flow are not always of the most obvious types
IT HAS happened to all of us. You’re in the middle of an important point, or reaching the climax of a humorous anecdote, and someone barges right in. You may jump back in to finish your story, indignantly stammer a few more words or quietly fume while the interrupter takes the floor, but the moment has passed: your eloquent point is lost, your story garbled.
Media reports tell us that men often interrupt and “mansplain” things to women – last month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau got unflattering attention for doing so – and stereotypes would have us believe that people from some countries are more likely to jump in than those from others. But take a closer look at how interruptions play out and things are not always what they seem. Figure out why and how people interrupt and you might find yourself more forgiving of the big mouth who stole your moment or better placed to avoid it happening again.
Let’s start with the oft-cited finding that men are much quicker to interrupt and talk over women than the other way round. Media reports aside, the original research backing up this idea comes from the 1970s. It showed that, in covertly recorded conversations between men and women in the United States, the men cut in 46 out of 48 times. And a 2014 study found that men and women both interrupted women more than they did men.
But psychologist Ann Weatherall at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand says the early studies counted all overlapping speech, skewing the results. “Sometimes people overlap and it’s not interruptive at all,” she says. It is also hard to know whether men interrupt because of their gender or their status, she says, with men more often holding positions of power.
To try and disentangle the relationship between gender, status and interrupting, Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago took their research to the US Supreme Court, in a manner of speaking. In this arena, where nine justices must together reach a decision, the ability to dominate the floor can determine the fate of a case.
