An interesting article.<p>Something interesting maybe none or few you will likely experience: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous meetings, presumably any 12-step meeting.<p>Say what you will about the 12 steps, and the belief of god that is associated with them. Feel free to disagree with the dogma. As a member I openly do that from time to time.<p>The real beauty of these meetings is that when someone speaks, they are left to speak completely uninterrupted. (Some groups use a timer and people generally wrap it up when the timer goes off.) Speaking about your experience during a meeting is called “sharing” and it is fucking magical. It’s helped me learn to listen, it’s helped me to speak extemporaneously on things that matter to me deeply, it’s taught me patience as an object lesson. You may not agree with what the other person is saying - there is no rule that you have to, and as might be expected it is not at all an infrequent thing that you hear absolute nonsense or worse. But there are also messages of beauty, there is often identification, there is definitely learning, and there is freedom, and there is genuine respect.<p>I believe there is some significant power in the 12 steps: confession of harms caused, attempts at restitution where at all appropriate, and learning to take responsibility for one’s actions. I do not believe in an all powerful and loving god because there is simply too much needless suffering in the world for me to agree with it. Occasionally I share about this but I try not to harp on it.<p>But the real beauty of a 12 step meeting is in the sharing, in my opinion…
As someone who's been an interlocutor for six decades, my concern is the reverse. Yes there are people who love to dominate no matter what - and interrupt anytime.
But there are far more people who think that conversation is either a monologue or an exchange of monologues - and it absolutely is not.
An interjection is not an interruption, and conversation IS a contract; meaning that the subject must be of interest to both parties, and signed on to by both parties or be abandoned quickly. A short introduction of a new topic of interest to you is all you get, if the other party doesn't pick that topic up, then it's on to the next possible or proposed topic, period.
Conversation is back and forth, a distinction made clear in ancient Greek plays because only slaves at that time had to endure monologues; so to subject another free citizen to behavior only a slave had to endure was calculated to offend mortally.
To modify Ibsen's advice: "If you don't want to be interrupted, buy a dog."
One thing that always bothers me about this is that interrupters are often seen as bad, while non-interrupters are seen as good. You hear this a lot in the context of engineering meetings - there's Tommy the interrupter who always shouts his thoughts, while Grace the quiet one has lots of intelligent things to say but never gets a chance because people are talking over her.<p>It's always portrayed as the interrupter's problem - they should stop and let other people speak. And hey, I don't disagree with that. You've probably guessed that I'm an interrupter, but I make an extremely concerted effort to shut my damn gob. But if it's reasonable for me to change my behavior, why can't we expect the non-interrupters to do their part a bit and... interrupt? I'm sure it's uncomfortable for them to do that, but it's uncomfortable for me to keep my mouth shut when you're explaining something that I already grasp, and if I just cut in right now I can save us both a few minutes of conversation that's totally unnecessary.<p>People then complain that non-interrupters don't get the same praise/promotions/other good things because they're not heard, but at some point isn't that on them? Part of what you're getting paid for is to contribute your thoughts during meetings. If you're not doing that solely because it's uncomfortable, isn't that a weakness for you as an employee?<p>I'll just reiterate here that I'm not anti-non-interrupter, and I go out of my way to make sure smart people who tend to be quieter get involved in the conversation. That said, I do think this is one of those things where neither side is inherently more right or wrong than the other, but one side gets treated as the bad guy.
He’s describing a form of “cooperative overlapping”: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/opinion/interrupting-cooperative-overlapping.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/opinion/interrupting-coop...</a><p>Things like this are cultural and learned. I think for many people it isn’t until they first hit a radical change of frame (say, going away to college or moving to a new city) that they realize there even <i>are</i> different conversational styles.<p>One thing I hadn’t considered until TFA is the effect of <i>not</i> being interrupted. I can definitely tend to drone on, especially if I’m explaining something. Unconsciously, I’m waiting for you to signal that we’re on the same page by taking the conversational ball and running with it. Failing that, I don’t really know when to stop.
This article seems so gentle to me. I’m surprised American culture is so tolerant of people interrupting. I am from a country where the culture is a lot more formal and here interrupting is seen as extremely impolite and by the second time you do it everyone will probably think you act like a child and treat you like one.
I have a friend who is a Barker, who I am always annoyed at because I am a Meek type and I more often than not cannot finish making my points to her. I do not feel that she listens to me. Why do I still like her?<p>This article, to me, pairs very well with the other top post on HN right now [1]. Thanks to that article I learned that we feel more connected towards someone the quicker they reply to us [2].<p>There's no conclusive evidence for my theory here that being an interrupter can also trigger the "connectability" heuristic, but it's certainly worth considering.<p>[1] <a href="https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs" rel="nofollow">https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversation...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116915119" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116915119</a>
In other literature these conversation styles are called "high considerateness" (the non-interrupter style) and "high involvement" (the interrupter style). The high involvement style is more common among people from northeastern cities - they tend to leave much shorter pauses in conversation and to finish others' sentences as a way to show that they're fully engaged in the interaction.
I know the COI members will downvote this, but I do not associate with people who constantly interrupt others. Because they’re often impolite in many other ways as well. I love my life not communicating with them.<p>And I think there’s a correlation between people who have a constant desire to assert dominance over others, and people who often interrupt. It’s like the earliest red flag for me. I know because I used to be a COI member a long time ago.
What's being marked here as a "barker" is frequently someone who is actually trying to blow past what they think is a weak or deceptive point into another that they see as stronger. They're refusing to be interrupted when they feel vulnerable, and moving to where they don't.<p>If you wait for them to finish, and begin your response by commenting on their earlier point, they'll immediately interrupt you and accuse you of avoiding their final point.<p>edit: you end up forced to argue with conclusions rather than premises or steps. Instead of arguing e.g. "maybe Mrs. X didn't notice Y was missing, we both missed it the first time," instead you're forced to argue whether Mrs. X is a good person or not, and being accused of going out of your way to defend Mrs. X.
The wizard has mastered all 4 quadrants and skillfully choses protocols based on the current programming contexts at play.<p>Also, communication is programming and the wizard is very clear about this.
Serial Offender, fallen off the wagon many times over the decades.<p>I've seen some amazing pushback. A researcher who bellowed "I HAVE NOT FINISHED" so loud, it was like the MTV man-in-a-chair reaction from everyone else. I wasn't the guilty party that time but I could have been.<p>It's often said people believe women do most interrupting when the stats are very good 75% or more in mixed dialogue, is men's speaking time. (or used to be. maybe there's been a shift but I doubt it)<p>I do think its a combination of things. Well meaning engagement/reflection signals, "me-too" and also the tangents being struck, fleeting moments in the interupters stack of ideas. But also dominance asserting.<p>As an offendor, I don't mean to minimise the impact it has. I know it's not good. But I want to interrupt and intrude another one I can't handle:<p>"correct"<p>If you say this to me as I speak, you're dead to me. You aren't the arbiter of right and wrong, you aren't the teacher, you aren't the prover. If you want to assert agreement, find another way.
There are different types of conversations. If it's "I am willing to dedicate my time to your needs", interrupting contradicts this promise, as you know best what your needs are, maybe it's just to be heard. But if it's "I can't get back to work till we are finished", it's your responsibility to not detain me longer than necessary and that includes being Ok with me interrupting to hurry things along. We need situational awareness, not making a church of either style of talking.
Fascinating how different online discussions are. We are still competing for eyeballs but we can speak our minds uninterrupted and chose to follow the threads of conversation at our own pace and interest. Another outlier is a group chat where recorded voice messages are used heavily. It's more of series of monologues than a dialogue. It is interesting when the channel explodes, people recording far more content than you can keep up with. Normal conversations can also get loud, but people usually break off into smaller groups instead of talking over each other in a common channel.<p>The discussion around this article changed my perspective a bit. I find myself quickly losing interest in conversations when interrupts occur, they strike me as rude and disrespectful. Never before saw it as cultural thing, a mechanism that the interrupted party would expect and even appreciate.
I think people are sometimes forced into one position or another by brain chemistry.<p>If you have ADHD, and can't hold a thought long enough that when it is your turn to talk comes around, then you are forced into a position of interrupting, or, that thought is lost.<p>Depending on how important or useful it is, you can be put in a lose/lose position.<p>So, how I interact with people, depends a lot on what they have going on mentally wise.<p>That took a long time to learn.
Couple of thoughts:<p>1. The friend was an a******.<p>2. I find that the vast majority of people who complain about being interrupted tend to be run-on-sentence people. Let's call them <i>"The Uninterruptibles"</i>. It baffles me that this kind of person doesn't consider it to be rude when dominating the conversation for 20 minutes without a single entry point for dialogue, jumping into 10 different topics in that time, but is offended by the inevitable interruption when they try to jump onto the 6th topic without even a full-stop.<p>3. Interrupters rarely get interrupted, because they generally think in single topics and talk in full sentences. This is in fact the crux of most interruptions: completing one argument or solidifying understanding before jumping to the next. On the rare occasion that an 'interrupter' runs-on a bit themselves, they will gladly accept a clarifying interruption, and if it's important to finish the point before moving on to the next topic, they will indicate so without feigning offense.<p>4. This means that in the presence of an Uninterruptible, there's a high chance the other person will necessarily become an interrupter, lest they be reduced to a mere spectator. Whereas the Uninterruptible will have plenty of opportunities to reply, interject, and so forth, without ever having to interrupt, due to normal cadence and punctuated thoughts of their conversational counterpart. This makes one person stand out even more as an 'interrupter', but it's ridiculous to blame <i>them</i> for it. Yet this is what happens.
Definite overlap with another essay on the front page right now, 'Good conversations have lots of doorknobs': <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542260" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542260</a>
`In short, my friend told me that I am a member of the "Church of Interruption" because I often interrupt him when we are talking. He said that this is efficient because it allows us to both know that we understand each other. However, I asked what the problem is, and he did not answer.`