Objective Versus Perceived Vocal Interruptions in the Dialogues of Unacquainted Pairs, Friends, and Couples

Abstract

Two studies are presented that examined whether men interrupt differently than women and whether they are perceived to interrupt differently. First, 84 individuals participated in 25-minute conversations that were automatically summarized as a set of vocal interruptive behaviors. Statistical analyses indicated no sex differences. The second study had 80 judges rate five of the videotapes from the first study (selected on the basis of highly similar objective interruptions) in terms of the how interruptive the judges viewed the conversationalists to be. Women were perceived to interrupt significantly more then men. Tb help understand the discrepant findings, a subset of the original tapes was recoded using a subjective procedure. Findings replicated those yielded by the objective coding method. This set of findings suggests that differences in the interruptive behavior of men and women may be more perceived than actual.