]]]]]]]]]]]]]] LOOK, JUST DON'T INTERRUPT! [[[[[[[[[[[[[[ By Geoffrey W. Beattie Geoffrey Beattie considers the chatter of the sexes. Dr Geoffrey W. Beattie is at the Department of Psychology in the University of Sheffield. (From New Scientist, 23 September 1982, pp. 859-860) [Kindly uploade by Freeman 10602PANC] [Though this six-year-old article is a reply to a piece in a British newspaper, it has important lessons about points-of-view, `feminist science' and the acceptance and spread of what becomes `common knowledge'. -- OP ] Women are oppressed, so the media are wont to tell us. The ``Naked Ape'' column of the Guardian's women's page acts as a nagging reminder. Recently, ``Guardian Women'' went further. On the 23 August, Dale Spender produced scientific evidence for the verbal oppression of women. Women, it seems, can't get a word in. The reason apparently is that when they attempt to talk, men interrupt -- ``I found that not only do men do most of the talking -- they do almost all of the interrupting, taking over the topic of conversation and cutting off the previous speaker.'' This might come as some surprise given the traditional wisdom that women talk the most -- ``Si femme il y a, silence il n'y a'', or Washington Irving's ``a woman's tongue is the only weapon that sharpens with use''. Dale Spender says much folk wisdom is simply wrong. ``Women are the talkative sex. Right?'', she asks. ``Wrong'', she replies. The evidence comes from linguistics. The classic study which she mentions, although not by name, is the one that Don Zimmerman and Candace West carried out at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California in the early 1970s. In conversations between men and women, men, it seems, were responsible for 96 per cent of all interruptions. Zimmerman and West are in no doubts as to what this means. Interruptions, they interject, are ``a display of dominance or control to the female (and to any witnesses) and ... a control device since the incursion (particularly if repeated) disorganizes the local construction of a topic.'' Dale Spender puts it more simply: ``Those with power and status talk more and interrupt more''. No whining here -- ``Women are oppressed''. Wham! there's the evidence. But how sound are Zimmerman and West's observations? In my view, despite this study being very frequently quoted, both by academics and most feminist authors of the past few years, the answer is, ``Not very''. The sample in the study is small and unrepresentative, the figures misleading and the interpretation too narrow. First, the sample, 31 conversational snatches or ``segments'', consist of everyday ``chit-chat''. We are not, however, told anything about the length of these segments. All the people recorded were middle-class, under 35 and white. Moreover, we are simply told that in 11 conversations between men and women, men used 46 interruptions, but women only two. The problem with this is that you might simply have one very voluble man in the study which has a disproportionate effect on the total. Indeed, one man did contribute 11 interruptions (nearly one quarter of the total). This means that the other 10 men contributed on average just 3.5 each. If there was another particularly voluble man in the sample, these figures would again drop dramatically. Zimmerman and West also studied only conversations between two people where it may not be necessary to interrupt to gain the floor. In a series of studies on interviews with Margaret Thatcher by Denis Tuohy, Brian Walden, Llew Gardner, and others on television, I found that she is interrupted more often by her interviewer than she herself interrupts, although of course she speaks much more than her interviewer. In other words, we cannot draw any conclusions about the amount of talk allowed on the basis of frequency of interruption in conversations involving two people. I have analysed rates of interruption in larger groups (Linguistics, 1981). I based my study on university tutorials, where it may be necessary to interrupt to gain the floor since there are more people to whom the current speaker can hand the floor. It involved about 10 hours of tutorial discussion and some 557 interruptions (compared with 55 in the Zimmerman and West study), I found that women interrupted men in 33.8 per cent of floor exchanges, and men interrupted women in 34.1 per cent of floor switches. No difference! There are further problems in the Zimmerman and West study. They provide no evidence of how men behave with other men. Perhaps men not only oppress women but also oppress each other as well. Zimmerman and West, however, combine interruption rates for men by men and women by women. They report only seven interruptions for conversations between members of the same sex. Does that mean in such conversations people do not interrupt, or alternatively where the segments shorter in these conversations? Zimmerman and West tell us nothing about the length of the segments in the study nor do they attempt to standardise interruption rates. Again, in my study, there was no difference in the rate of interruption of men by men, and women by women. Zimmerman and West's data are weak but their subsequent interpretation is also too narrow. Why do interruptions necessarily reflect dominance? Can interruptions not arise from other sources? Do some interruptions not reflect interest and involvement as in the following exchange: TUTOR: ... so he he gives the impression that he he wasn't able to train any of them up ("Now" ( STUDENT: ("He" didn't try hard enough heh heh heh This would be classified as an interruption by Zimmerman and West because it involves simultaneous speech (the words in [double quotes]) and the first speaker's utterance in not complete. Here, however, the student interrupts not, I think to appear dominant but to make a witticism which reflected interest and involvement in the proceedings. In my study of tutorials I found that students interrupted tutors more frequently than vice-versa. Interruptions, therefore, cannot always reflect dominance. Anne Cutler, from Sussex University, and I have carried out experiments that suggest some interruptions in Mrs Thatcher's interviews arise because at some points people think she has completed her turn when she has not. It is not that interviewers are trying to dominate her in conversation (even though she is a woman) but that they are interpreting certain signals in her speech incorrectly. Women may indeed be oppressed, and linguistic science may come up with evidence that women are oppressed in conversation. The evidence so far, however, is weak. ``Si femme il y a, silence il n'y a?'' -- peut-etre, peut-etre [circumflex accent on the first `e' in `etre']. * * *
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