Interesting piece on Atoms vs Bits about conversational norms -- interrupters vs non-interrupters.
Interrupters And Non-Interrupters
- Interrupters have a norm where you keep talking until someone interrupts you, it's not rude to interrupt someone, and you shouldn't mind if someone interrupts you. (Apparently linguists call this "high-involvement cooperative overlapping").
- Non-interrupters have a norm where you don't start speaking until someone else has stopped, or invited you in.
I relate to this, in terms of recognising the dynamic and understanding it as one of those things that affects how much I'm involved in any particular social interaction.
The piece gets into more detail, and is worth reading, but it's not a moral equation or an argument for one norm being superior to the other. But it does make the case that one norm, unchecked, ends up being dominant.
It reminds me also of something I heard about on the Hidden Brains podcast a few years ago, researching different norms around conversational dead-air more generally, and what that determined for people's own norms around when it was appropriate to jump in.
It's this one: Mind Reading 2.0: Why Conversations Go Wrong which, looking back, covers a lot of other relevant ground here, too.
I may have the details wrong, but, for instance, they contrasted an average New Yorker -- with very short dead-air tolerance, to the extent that they're almost collaborative cross-talking -- with folks from different states/cities, where there was much more of a tendency to leave a longer gap between utterances or topics before picking up the conversation. That, too, had a dominant aspect to the dynamic. Not in a socially dominant sense -- just that one of those things will tend to win out by its own nature.
This refers me back to an old post, What are we really talking about, in that it's another one of those communication dynamics that are, I think, fairly obvious when someone gives us the vocabulary to grapple with it. And what makes a good communicator is not having one particular norm over another, but the ability to identify such norms and navigate them skilfully. As with other such things, there's the surface layer, and then there's all the stuff going on underneath.
I suspect there's an element of interiority modelling, as well, that underpins a lot of this -- being continuously aware of [what you think might be] the inner state of your social partners and folding that into what you're saying or doing.