Interrupting: Definition, Examples, & Tips

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Why do we interrupt others in conversations? If you’ve been wondering why interrupting happens, psychology research has the answers – and they might surprise you. ​
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As a couple therapist, I am very attuned to people talking over each other. Successful communication between partners, particularly around sensitive topics, requires a give-and-take that can be very hard for couples. When emotions are charged, we often become more invested in getting our point across than listening to what the other person has to say. In other words, it is easy to refrain from interrupting when things are calm, and hard not to interrupt when the conversation gets heated.
So do we interrupt just when our emotions are running high, or is there more to it? Psychologists and linguists have studied the behavior of interrupting for some time, and they have interesting things to say about when and why we interrupt. I think this information could be really useful for your understanding of what is happening in the conversations in your life, so let’s dig in and see what the research says.​
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What Is Interrupting? (A Definition)​

We can define interrupting as the act of cutting off somebody else’s speech, typically so that we can speak instead (Smith-Lovin & Brody, 1989). A full interruption effectively ends the turn of the other speaker, hindering them from continuing to speak or stopping their speech entirely. It is important from the start to distinguish between what linguists and psychologists call intrusive interruptions versus cooperative overlaps (Anderson & Leaper, 1998).

Interrupting vs Cooperative Overlap

Cooperative overlaps tend to be shorter interjections – quick things we say to encourage or support the other person. Think about when a friend you haven’t seen in a while excitedly tells you a story from their recent life. As their story continues, you might find yourself naturally saying things such as, “wow”, “no way”, or “I can’t believe it”. In this situation, you are not trying to interrupt your friend so much as to indicate your engagement and interest, and the effect is to contribute to your friend’s enthusiasm, not distract them.
 
By contrast, an intrusive interruption discourages the person from continuing to talk. In fact, psychologists believe that the point of most interruptions is to take control of the conversation (Karakowsky et al., 2004). If an interruption is successful, the interrupter now gets to either state their opinion on the topic being discussed or change the topic entirely.

Opposite of Interrupting​

The opposite of interrupting is allowing your conversational partner to finish what they are saying. Believe it or not, interruptions are actually relatively rare; in most conversations, especially low-conflict ones, people finish most of their thoughts without interruption (Smith-Lovin & Brady, 1989).

I think we spend most of our time in the “opposite of interrupting” space because interruptions are naturally aversive. It feels good to have conversation flowing smoothly, and interruptions often seem impolite or overly aggressive (Lycan, 1977). Linguists have written extensively about how conversations work because people unconsciously follow rules of cooperation, such as saying only what is necessary and relevant, and providing neither too little nor too much information (Grice, 1975). These rules are so intuitive and widespread that even preschoolers notice when people do not follow them (Eskritt et al., 2008). Interruptions violate this principle of cooperative conversation.

Even as a therapist, who is responsible for making sure conversations are both safe and productive, I sometimes have trouble interrupting people when the situation requires it. In interrupting others, I try to make it clear why the interruption could be in everybody’s best interest.​

What Leads Someone To Interrupt?

In conversations, all the people involved have goals. Some of those goals are likely overlapping, such as when two friends are trying to decide where to go to dinner – coming to a decision is a shared goal. We also typically have conversational goals that are much less apparent to us and related to more basic needs. For example, the desire to look good or to be right, the satisfaction of which would make us feel safe or good about ourselves, might be present for us, but not necessarily within our conscious awareness.
 
Interrupting happens when we want to put our goals before the other person’s goals, or before the apparently mutual goals of the conversation. In a conversation, whoever is speaking is working to accomplish their own goals in that moment, and maybe to make progress toward shared goals (Kollock et al., 1985). So if I interrupt you in the midst of advancing your agenda through speech, I am doing so to put my needs and goals first, instead. In other words, I am trying to dominate the conversation because, consciously or unconsciously, I have the belief that my goals for the interaction are more important than yours (Kollock et al., 1985).
 
Let’s remember that we are talking about interruptions that are not collaborative because little interruptions that we make that support what the speaker is saying and encourage them to continue are actually helping them to advance their conversational goals (Tannen, 1987). But interruptions as we are discussing them here violate the idea that conversations are about turn-taking – these interruptions say, “My priorities or perspective are more important right now.”

​​​Reasons for Interrupting

Sometimes, people interrupt because they perceive or have been told that they have a higher status than the person they are interrupting. People who possess a more privileged social identity, or people who have been experimentally manipulated (in a research study) to see themselves as superior to the person with whom they are speaking, may be more likely to interrupt (Robinson & Reis, 1989). 

When observing a conversation, we perceive people who interrupt as having higher status as well, and people who let interruptions slide as being of lower status (Farley, 2008). In fact, the people in the conversation tend to experience themselves that way, too. I know that I sometimes feel a bit deflated if someone cuts me off and gets to redirect the conversation. I also perceive the other person a bit more negatively, which research tells us is an opinion many people form of others who frequently interrupt (Robinson & Reis, 1989).

Interrupting in Everyday Life

I think these findings can explain a lot of social phenomena that we see in our daily lives. For example, what is a presidential debate, at least in this day and age, if not a continuous stream of interruptions? In such a “conversation”, participants are typically far more concerned with getting their point across, seeming competent, and establishing superiority over the other person than they are concerned with politeness or establishing goodwill with their debate opponent.
 
I see a similar pattern at play most anytime there is a conflict between people. We have conflicts when things that really matter to us seem to be at risk, so we enter the conversation invested in making sure we either get what we want or don’t lose what we want to keep. This makes it harder to abide by the conversational norms that psychologists and linguists have described serving as the guides for successful conversation. Instead, we become more liable to interrupt in order to protect and advance our personal goals for the interaction.​

Interrupting & Gender

For a few decades, psychologists were very invested in understanding whether men or women interrupt more often. This makes a lot of sense, as the idea that interruptions are about assuming control over the conversation would seem to map onto gender roles: if men interrupt more, it is because they are trying to maintain the social advantages and privileged position that they have been afforded over women in our society. Ultimately, the evidence is ambiguous; we cannot conclude for certain that men use more interruptions than women (James & Clarke, 1993).
 
However, this research has found that the gender composition of a conversation does matter for how often people interrupt. Women seem to interrupt men and women equally, while men are more likely to interrupt other men in mixed-gender settings (Smith-Lovin & Brody, 1989). In fact, men may engage in more supportive conversational overlaps when in all-male settings than when in mixed-gender settings. To me, this suggests that men are indeed motivated by a desire to appear as high status when in front of women.
 
Yet another reason for interruptions, one that I think was overlooked by many psychology researchers, is simply impulsivity. People who are by their nature more impulsive, such as most people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, are more likely to interrupt others (Green et al., 2014). I think this is an important distinction because people who are impulsive may not have wanted to take over the conversation, necessarily, but were perhaps instead overcome by the urge to participate more actively.​

Examples of Interrupting

Let’s look at three examples of interrupting with slightly different outcomes; each of them fits under the category of intrusive interruptions (Anderson & Leaper, 1998; James & Clarke, 1993):
 
  • First, some interruptions change the topic completely. Think of a group of school-age children on the playground. As one child starts to describe the rules and setting for a make-believe game, another loudly says over them, “Let’s go play on the swings instead.”  
  • Second, some interruptions are simply aimed at making the current speaker stop speaking. For example, if a client of mine in couple therapy brings up a subject that is off-topic and unlikely to be helpful in the current moment, I might say, “I think it might be better not to focus on that right now. It seems to be getting us away from our original goal for the conversation.”  
  • Third, some interruptions directly challenge the other person’s point. This is the standard political debate interruption – it conveys the message that not only is your opinion wrong, but mine is right, and that’s what we should be talking about instead.​  
  • A fourth kind of interruption that comes to mind is of the clarification-seeking variety, such as when one person uses a term that the other person is not familiar with, and the listener interrupts to say, “Hold on, I don’t know what that word you used means.”

Disruption vs Interruption​

Intrusive interruptions are clearly disruptions to the conversational flow. As such, they violate our general expectation that people will let each other speak freely and make their own points (Burgoon & Dunbar, 2006). In this way, interruptions have the effect of not only altering the flow of conversation but also drawing attention to the fact of the disruption itself. Perhaps you have been in or witnessed a conversation in which the fact that one person interrupted the other becomes the topic of conversation – sometimes, this derailment of the topic at hand might even have been the goal of the interrupter.​

Is Interrupting Rude?

Interruptions that are intrusive and not collaborative are generally perceived by others as rude – people who interrupt in this way are often viewed as less agreeable and domineering (Karakowsky et al., 2004; Robinson & Reis, 1989).

Interrupting & Microaggressions

Since interruptions may be more common among higher-status people toward lower-status people, they absolutely can constitute a form of microaggression (Solnit, 2014). Interruptions are a way to establish dominance in a conversation, and to the extent that people with higher status may feel (consciously or unconsciously) threatened by being around people with a lower status, they may engage in interrupting to establish their superiority. I imagine that most of the time when this happens, it is not a conscious choice on the part of the interrupter, but the underlying bias may still be present.

How to Listen Without Interrupting

Perhaps the simplest way to avoid interrupting is to remind yourself of how you would like to be treated. Few of us go into a conversation wanting to be interrupted – we expect that others will at least give us the dignity of finishing our thoughts (Goffman, 1959). For people who are highly impulsive, psychotherapeutic interventions may help them reduce the frequency with which they interrupt others (Bear & Nietzel, 1991).

How To Deal With Someone Else Interrupting

If someone else interrupts you, you can always reassert whichever of the following rights they may have violated. You have a right to (1) express your opinion, (2) speak on the topics that interest you, so long as they are not offensive or harmful to others, and (3) complete the point you were making. It is perfectly reasonable to ask the other person to respect these rights after they have interrupted you.
 
If you would like more in-depth advice on this topic, you might try watching the following video:​

Video: How to Get Somebody to Stop Interrupting You with 4 Simple Steps

Articles Related to Interrupting

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Interrupting

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Interrupting​

We all interrupt people at times – the desire to direct the conversation or get our point across overtakes us. It is okay to have our own agenda in a conversation, and it is okay to get attached to that agenda sometimes! You can always just apologize for speaking out of turn – most people will accept the apology and let the conversation carry on.​

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