Conversation Interruptus: Critical Social Skill or Just Plain Rudeness? : Remember When ‘Don’t Interrupt’ Was Being Polite?

Hey, wait a minute. Uh, pardon me. Excuse me, please, but aren’t interruptions:

(a) the height of rudeness?

(b) the latest in yuppie social diplomacy?

(c) essential for effective communication?

(d) all of the above?

If you guessed all of the above, consider yourself in the right conversational ballpark. For while interrupting others is still put down as being obnoxiously rude, it’s now also viewed as a social skill as critical as knowing how to position yourself for a fat raise or what to do if someone pinches you in the elevator.

A Study of Interruptions

Disrupting other people’s speech--whether it’s to keep your meeting from running overtime, to inform your doctor of additional symptoms before he or she launches into a diagnosis, to derail a conversational showboat or simply grab the spotlight yourself--has been studied increasingly by academics and lay advisers alike.

Nobody seems to know for sure or even agree on why many interruptions occur. And now that proper ways to interrupt are being taught, there are any number of conflicting opinions on whether communication is best facilitated by talkers fluent in interrupting techniques, listening skills--or both.

But one thing is clear: Never before has it been so easy to interrupt others or be interrupted yourself, at least in those quarters of the world equipped with high technology.

Technology Makes It Easy

Today, for example, thanks to the invention of call waiting, it’s possible to interrupt someone with a phone call even when they’re already on the telephone. And interactive computer systems frequently permit workers to interrupt colleagues by flashing messages across their screens--no matter what else they may be doing.

But even old-fashioned, low-tech speech interruptions are prevalent and menacing enough that there are now growing numbers of places where normally polite individuals can learn the slickest and most advanced ways to take control of a conversation and interrupt others.

UCLA Medical Center, for instance, has been training patients in the delicate art of getting their doctors to shut up and listen. (For several years now, studies by conversation analysts and other social scientists have repeatedly shown that physicians typically interrupt their patients far more than patients interrupt their doctors’ conversations.)

For the last four years, Dr. Sheldon Greenfield, a UCLA professor of medicine and public health, and Sherrie Kaplan, a UCLA assistant professor of public health, have been teaching patients “how to be more outspoken with their doctors.”

“We try to find out why they don’t ask questions, if they’re intimidated, if they’re embarrassed. We try to get them to see the reasons they’re afraid or why they forget to ask things. We encourage them to define their questions specifically so the doctors don’t avoid them,” explained Greenfield, who is also an internist and co-director of the Rand Corp.’s Center for the Study of Health Policy.

All this communication training happens in a single, private, 20-minute session in which about 200 patients have thus far participated--with encouraging results, some of which have been reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

After patients were trained for 20 minutes in how to use “controlling behaviors, including interruptions,” with their doctors, interruptions by doctors decreased from an average of six to three per visit, said Kaplan, while at the same time interruptions by patients increased from an average of one per visit to four per visit.

More significantly, the health of patients improved. “Outcomes were improved in three separate trials,” Greenfield recalled. “A group of diabetic patients showed improved blood sugar control. A group of patients with hypertension showed decreases in their blood pressure levels. Patients with ulcers also improved. It was very dramatic. We think it happened because the patients were getting a much better sense of control over their own care and a sense of collegiality with the doctor.”

Private Consultants

But you don’t have to participate in a university research project to learn how to be a polished buttinsky.

Some private communications consultants do considerable business in training executives how to interrupt others and how to talk so they won’t be cut off. And, according to these trainers, many professional talkers who appear on television have undergone such schooling.

Christen Brown, a Beverly Hills-based communications consultant whose On Camera firm has trained executives at such Fortune 500 companies as Xerox, Hughes and TRW, has also prepared a number of guests and anchors for network talk shows.

“I’ve seen people who later became clients of mine go on David Susskind with a group of guests and get to say only about six sentences because no one had trained them in interruption techniques,” said Brown, who declined to make public the names of her more celebrated trainees, saying it would be a breach of professional ethics.

Brown teaches her clients an assortment of interrupting techniques but cautions her trainees that they are more likely to work on shows which are not as “tightly controlled” as Ted Koppel’s “Nightline.”

“Koppel has an agenda. He uses interruption to direct his focus. He doesn’t let anybody ramble. He never loses the objective in his questioning,” she emphasized. “That’s why he’s so effective. The way he interrupts people is very businesslike. He’s very goal-directed.” Koppel, interviewed by telephone from Washington, said that interrupting people effectively is nothing he set out to learn nor “something I’m really conscious of doing.”

Koppel believes the ability to interrupt appropriately and effectively is a function of being a good listener. But even he admitted he has sometimes encountered interviewees who were literally impossible to cut off.

Egyptian Ambassador

Asked who has been the most difficult to interrupt, Koppel replied “anyone who’s not familiar with the conventions of American television.” He cited an Egyptian ambassador in Cairo whom he interviewed by satellite, an official who apparently was unaccustomed to being interrupted, even by journalists.

Koppel was eventually able to get him off the air by announcing the conversation would be ended by a commercial. But three minutes later, when the show was back on the air, Koppel said, the man was still talking, without ever having checked for any sign of whether anybody was listening to him.

So that her clients won’t go off on such verbal tangents--or even get interrupted by interviewers--Brown teaches her clients “how to speak in televisionese.” This entails learning to make a point cogently in 20 seconds or less, learning not to interrupt themselves with “uhs” and other non-words and avoiding rambling, “an invitation to be interrupted.”

But she suggests the surest way not to be interrupted is “to speak from the heart” because when individuals speak that sincerely and with that level of conviction, people are “almost compelled to listen. They feel connected to you.”

In addition, she advises those who wish to communicate effectively on television, in board rooms or even in bedrooms to study the dynamics of conversations that work well on television.

What about the conversational fireworks of those two great interrupters, Maddie Hayes and David Addison of TV’s “Moonlighting,” characters who don’t just stop at trampling on each other’s words? These feisty detectives, played by Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, also speak at the same time, at length. It’s a bit that’s become one of the show’s signatures.

“The way they do it is very witty. It’s not rude,” Brown said. “They finish each other’s sentences. It may not be something you want to do in business, but in a television format it’s sexy because it implies intimacy.”

Commentary on the Times

According to “Moonlighting” creator and executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron, his characters’ simultaneous conversations are a commentary on today’s times only in so much as he wanted the show’s dialogue to be extremely fast-paced.

“When we were planning the pilot, Robert Butler, the director, suggested we look at ‘His Girl Friday,’ an old Howard Hawks movie. He said, ‘Watch this movie. They not only talk fast, they talk at the same time,’ ” recalled Caron.

Whether the characters are talking independently or simultaneously, Caron added, the show’s concern is always “can’t they say more and can’t they say it faster? I think it bespeaks their familiarity.

“There’s always a sense that you’re watching two people who are terribly bright and thoughts are rushing through their heads really fast. Their intention is to communicate--squared. I don’t think either of their brains has a neutral--only forward, second gear, third, fourth gear. . . . I don’t think we’ve ever received a letter saying slow ‘em down, shut ‘em up or why are they being so impolite?”

Richard Byrne, an adjunct professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications who lectures for corporate audiences internationally on “technology and the management of change,” suspects that the reason viewers thrive on watching Hayes and Addison interrupt each other incessantly is that the audience has been conveniently let in on the joke.

“There’s a tone of affection between those two characters,” he said, “and an underlying belief in the audience that they really like each other but just don’t know how to do it. A lot of families talk over each other in a very similar way.”

Reasons for Increase

As for interruptions in general, those which tend to disrupt rather than facilitate communication strike him as increasing for three reasons:

--The long-term influence of television. “Thirty years ago, we started raising a generation of kids that I call the 28 Minutes and 30 Seconds Generation. Their attention spans have been determined by the structures of television shows. For 30 years, people have watched complex issues being resolved--successfully--in less than 30 minutes. This has bred extraordinary impatience in the American population.”

--The information explosion. “Most experts now agree that general knowledge is doubling about every two years. In the leading-edge fields such as robotics or artificial intelligence, information is said to be doubling about every year because the fields are so new. To stay sane, you have to have an editing process to cope with that flood of ideas, just in pure self-defense. So people often interrupt if they see a conversation is not going somewhere that they want to go. What people want and need is strategic information--not everything.”

--The American preoccupation with and emulation of performers. “To many people, communication is now thought of as a performance art. It’s like a tennis match in which all you do is serve. At cocktail parties, you see people waiting for verbal on-ramps to score points. It used to be that people got as much satisfaction at hearing someone else complete a story as they did in starting one themselves. Today, people are interested in center stage and racking up points. That’s why they interrupt so inappropriately.”

Difficult to Generalize

Sociologists who do research in a relatively new field known as conversation analysis like to point out that it’s difficult to generalize about interruptions--even with considerable research. They note there are many different types of interruptions occurring in widely varied types of conversations. And that these assorted types of conversations may occur in very different types of settings--all of which may influence interruptions.

Some of the Variables

Naming just a few of the variations, UCLA sociologist Emanuel Schegloff, one of the pioneers in the field, observes that interruptions can be both verbal and nonverbal and can be viewed as rude or enthusiastic, controlling or submissive, depending on the situation or the interpreter.

Schegloff maintains there’s no way to know if interruptions are increasing or decreasing. As he put it, “We’d have to have been recording conversations in different contexts and we’d have to have some cogent way to compare them. And we’d have to have been doing that for a long period of time.” (Conversation analysis--which dissects the structure of talk, including the subtlest nuances, sounds and hesitations--has only been around since the 1960s.)

Schegloff is the first to admit that not much is known about the way conversation technically works. He’s hardly impressed with those who offer advice or opinions without data to back them up or without serious consideration of all the possibilities.

He sees few easy answers for subjects such as interruptions. For example, on the issue of whether the interrupter or interruptee is in a more powerful position, Schegloff explained that “who yields to whom may show submission and dominance. Or it may have nothing to do with submission and dominance at all. Or it may indicate the notion of noblesse oblige. The person who withdraws may be the person who can afford to withdraw.”

In some centers around the country, that’s precisely the tactic that’s being taught as a means to effective communication: withdrawing from conversation, at least for a while, and listening intently to what’s being said.

According to listening expert Lyman K. Steil, chairman of the board of the St. Paul, Minn.-based International Listening Institute, “The growth of individuals who are working in the field of listening has shown a marked increase in the last six years.”

Steil, who until 1982 was the chairman of the speech communication division in the University of Minnesota’s department of rhetoric, has taught listening skills in all five branches of the military service, at the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the Senate, and in a wide variety of large and small businesses.

A man who refuses to have a call-waiting device on his telephone and who founded the International Listening Assn., Steil said the organization now has about 500 members--among them academics, consultants and researchers--in 48 states and 13 countries.

In addition, there are countless individuals who don’t consider themselves listening experts but who are nonetheless working to train people not to interrupt others.

Richard Frankel, for example, a sociologist and assistant professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University School of Medicine, has been teaching medical students and residents how to interview patients without interrupting them so much.

‘First Is to Shut Up’

“In the area of interruptions, we encourage our physicians to do two things. The first is to shut up during the first part of the interview and the second is to solicit additional concerns from the patient--and to keep asking until they’re sure the patient has told them everything they need to know,” said Frankel, who, with Wayne State’s Dr. Howard Beckman, has been researching and teaching physician interviewing skills for the last six years.

Their research, Frankel added, has shown that physicians thus trained wound up spending an average of only an additional minute and a half per patient in listening to patient concerns--with considerable benefits. “We’ve found that in all cases, the effect has been positive. Physicians were more satisfied. They found their visits were more organized. The patients were also more satisfied and got better and more comprehensive care.”

At perhaps the far end of the pro-listening/anti-interrupting scale, there are even teachers such as New York City assertiveness instructor Arthur Reel who argue that interruption is “a way of showing your insecurity.”

A former playwright and theatrical director, Reel teaches assertion training through his own studio and at New York’s Learning Annex.

“I teach people to absorb more and then come back,” he said, “and I teach them that they will shortchange their own power of communication by speaking too fast and interrupting. When you do that, you don’t give yourself a chance to think. You shortchange the following components of communication that are necessary for assertiveness: language, choice of words, pacing, eloquence in general, the voice (you don’t breathe enough and give power to the voice which is necessary to establish your credibility). Also you shortchange tonal quality in voice, thereby not being interesting.”

While Reel considers interrupting “self-sabotage,” he admits there are occasional situations when it must be used. But, in general, he argues that waiting one’s turn to speak yields far greater benefits than interrupting.

“A key principle in assertiveness is the ability to absorb another person without losing your own viewpoint,” he insisted. “ It disarms an aggressive person. You give yourself a chance to think while you’re absorbing so you can come up with options, tactics and even brilliant metaphors.”