Hm. From my perspective I have seen many conversations be excessively railed (opposite of derailed) by lack of interruption.
Interrupting whenever you want to speak is very bad form. So is continuing to speak for as long as you’d like to. Meeting in the middle is an art. And I agree that making the desired form explicit would be a good idea.
The virtue of interruption is being able to change course faster, and saving time by responding when it sounds like the speaker is no longer making interesting new points. I seem to see people saying too much more often than saying too little before yielding the floor.
Whenever you notice that time has run out and more interesting threads were not followed, you might’ve had too few interruptions.
Time wastage to lack of interruption is much less the case with skilled and considerate conversationalists; but so are the downsides of their interruptions.
Either interruption or excessive speaking can be used to dominate a conversation; having everyone converse cooperatively is the meta-point. But many situations (in fact almost all) won’t have time for everyone to say everything they’d like to have heard, so competition is tempting and prevalent.
I agree that interrupting is an art. I love this statement in particular:
many situations (in fact almost all) won’t have time for everyone to say everything they’d like to have heard, so competition is tempting and prevalent
I feel that I have a handle on when to interrupt in a two-person conversation, but the dynamics of interrupting differ:
as the number of participants increases (there’s a phase shift at three, and then another one at six or seven as people typically don’t like to speak less than one fifth of the time);
as the conversation becomes less meta-cooperative (e.g, the conversation is happening in some public forum or in order for a decision to be made, so there is an incentive to speak more so that your ideas get to be heard more).
(As another note, I find that even with three people, there needs to be either a significant amount of yielding or else substantial agreement on what the topic and frame of the conversation should be/implicitly are, or else the thread of the conversation will repeatedly “miss the point” and meander.)
I would be interested to hear any insights anyone has about how to navigate any of these better, unilaterally or by establishing group norms (formally or by reinforcement).
Hm. From my perspective I have seen many conversations be excessively railed (opposite of derailed) by lack of interruption.
Interrupting whenever you want to speak is very bad form. So is continuing to speak for as long as you’d like to. Meeting in the middle is an art. And I agree that making the desired form explicit would be a good idea.
The virtue of interruption is being able to change course faster, and saving time by responding when it sounds like the speaker is no longer making interesting new points. I seem to see people saying too much more often than saying too little before yielding the floor.
Whenever you notice that time has run out and more interesting threads were not followed, you might’ve had too few interruptions.
Time wastage to lack of interruption is much less the case with skilled and considerate conversationalists; but so are the downsides of their interruptions.
Either interruption or excessive speaking can be used to dominate a conversation; having everyone converse cooperatively is the meta-point. But many situations (in fact almost all) won’t have time for everyone to say everything they’d like to have heard, so competition is tempting and prevalent.
I agree that interrupting is an art. I love this statement in particular:
I feel that I have a handle on when to interrupt in a two-person conversation, but the dynamics of interrupting differ:
as the number of participants increases (there’s a phase shift at three, and then another one at six or seven as people typically don’t like to speak less than one fifth of the time);
as the conversation becomes less meta-cooperative (e.g, the conversation is happening in some public forum or in order for a decision to be made, so there is an incentive to speak more so that your ideas get to be heard more).
(As another note, I find that even with three people, there needs to be either a significant amount of yielding or else substantial agreement on what the topic and frame of the conversation should be/implicitly are, or else the thread of the conversation will repeatedly “miss the point” and meander.)
I would be interested to hear any insights anyone has about how to navigate any of these better, unilaterally or by establishing group norms (formally or by reinforcement).