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A Linguist Explains There Are 2 Conversational Styles. Knowing Which You Prefer Can Make You More Successful
Whether someone interrupted seems like it should be simple to figure out. If one person cuts another off mid-sentence, that’s an interruption. If they waited their turn to speak, no interruption. But science shows real-life conversations are a lot more complicated than that.
Stanford linguist Katherine Hilton, for instance, recorded male and female actors reading the exact same script and then asked others to assess whether the people they heard in the recordings were interrupting. Women were judged far more harshly for their interjections, Hilton found, while men were more often perceived to be simply enthusiastic about the discussion. Clearly, what counts as a rude interruption isn’t cut-and-dried.
And now a recent online discussion has added another complication to the question. As Georgetown University linguist Deborah Tannen explained in The New York Times, people with different cultural backgrounds also have different styles when it comes to interruptions.
Are you a cooperative overlapper or a turn-taker?
The discussion of the whole topic was kicked off by a TikTok video from a user, Sari Rachel. In it, she calls herself “an interrupty person” and…
