"It's a conversation, not a speech"

There's a belief that runs underneath a lot of the others, and it's that conversation is by nature an exchange, so taking your turn is what you're supposed to do. Nobody gets to make a speech. Jumping in is just turn-taking done with energy.

Turn-taking is the right word for what conversation is. But the turn is taken at the finish. That's what Stivers's ten languages showed. The system everyone runs is that you speak, you stop, the other person starts. A turn taken by force, in overlap, isn't turn-taking done with energy. It's the system being overridden, and everyone in the room knows it, because everyone in the room runs the same system.

Think about what a turn is for. It's the space in which one person gets to think out loud to the end. Guy Itzchakov and colleagues, in 2018, ran five experiments on what happens to speakers when they're listened to well, meaning attentively and without judgement, and found that good listening lowered the speaker's social anxiety and gave them more clarity about their own view. Not more certainty that they were right, but a clearer sense of what they actually thought, and more willingness to say it. Being allowed to get to the end is how people find out what they think. When you jump, you don't just take the turn. You take the last stretch of thinking, the part where the view was about to become clear.

A conversation where one person is always the one who finishes and the other is always the one who gets finished isn't an exchange. It's a speech with an audience that keeps trying to speak. And the audience, over time, stops trying.

There's a related habit worth a paragraph, which is talking more than you listen. Interrupters usually do. If you've jumped on someone's story, you now have the turn, and you'll usually keep it for a while. Over an evening the division of talking time tilts, and you go home feeling that it was a great conversation, because you did most of it. The person who went home with you has a different account. I won't develop that here, but the tally from chapter 1 will show it if you also mark roughly who had the turn after each jump.