Dysfunctional Discourse

To prevent others from dominating conversations, you must understand their tactics.

Reviewed by Margaret Foley

Key points

• Mansplaining, voice nonrecognition, and interruption are domination tactics in conversation.
• Dysfunctional communication patterns can be modeled as social games.
• There are important cultural (and gender) differences in communication patterns.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. —M. Switzer (see also Proverbs 17:28)

Jürgen Habermas, the aged scion of the Frankfurt School and critical theory, puts the spotlight of his social analysis on communication and its discontents. In The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1984/1981), he develops a vision of a mode of communication that is herrschaftsfrei, that is, free of [unnecessary] domination. The qualifier “unnecessary” is the great hedge, for without it, any vision of a social world entirely free of domination is a utopia, a dream, an illusion.

Lofty theory and volumes published with Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt are degrees of separation removed from the gritty world of everyday communication, where attempts at domination abound (Krueger, 2024a). People misunderstand, misconstrue, fail to listen, interrupt, and indulge in repetition, redundancy, and obfuscation. Paul Grice (1913–1988) made an earlier and valiant effort to set us straight on fair and equitable communication (Grice, 1975). His prose, though clearer than Habermas’s, had an equally limited effect on what mortals actually do when opening their mouths.

Wisdom often reduces to resignation. If humans cannot be educated to speak properly and fairly, it may be best to counsel silence. The sages of the East and the West who counseled thus had to open their mouths and accept the irony.

Psychological science is called upon to be pragmatic, to try to understand how things are and to seek opportunities for improvement. Hence, some of our communicative dysfunctions have been studied empirically. A recent article by Briggs et al. (2023) is a fine example. Team Briggs tackles the threesome annoyances of “mansplaining,” “voice nonrecognition,” and “interruption,” and they do so with a gendered lens, as arguably women are on the receiving end more often than men are. That said, these dysfunctions can spoil anyone’s mood.

Mansplaining occurs when a person (often a man) re-explains a matter of interest to another person (often a woman) who has already sufficiently explained it and who has, by objective standards, greater expertise in the matter than the man does. Mansplaining is a blunt attempt to force a stronger intellect into submission. It is difficult not to be infuriated by it.

Voice nonrecognition occurs when a speaker’s contribution to a conversation is ignored. Others move on as if the contribution had never been made. This is a crass case of social exclusion and thus invalidation.

Interruption is the most commonplace communicative dysfunction, and it is, in all likelihood, multi-determined. People interrupt not only in an attempt to assert dominance, but also because of impatience, limited attention span, or poor manners, or because their particular subculture does not frown upon interruption per se. Author and professor of linguistics Deborah Tannen, for example, has argued that the conversational culture of Jewish Manhattanites is marked by “cooperative overlapping,” which sounds to the uninitiated like chaotic and mutual interrupting (Tannen, 1981). Among the initiati, however, no one feels slighted; everyone is having a good time (see also Tannen, 2012).

In cultures where interruptions are frowned upon, they can be modeled as games of chicken, or juegos de gallina (Rapoport & Chammah, 1966). The interrupter scores points at the expense of the listener, who is the chicken. If both abstain from interruption they do well, and certainly better than if both keep interrupting each other.

Interrupters defect from good etiquette by not waiting their turn. Others try to dominate by waiting too long. This tactic is particularly risky (and annoying) when the power seeker and their target are interdependent and even more so when the power seeker asks the target for a favor or some other form of cooperation (Krueger, 2024b). Suppose A has offered B to write a letter to support an application that is due at the end of the month. To do the job, A needs B’s updated resume, and B knows this. Is there an excuse for B to let A wait? Reasonable people doubt that there is and yet this happens. Why? Is B still hoping to make last-minute improvements? Is B ambivalent or anxious about the outcome of the application? Is B a habitual procrastinator? A (and perhaps B too) has a hard time pinpointing the effective cause. To game theorists, B’s tardiness is a power move and an act of defection. The move is rational only if B cares more about moving one up with regard to A than about the material outcome at stake.

Some cultures have solved the problem of interruption by laying down norms for who (and for how long a speaker) may hold the floor without having to worry about being interrupted. When these norms are accepted and endorsed by the collective, they no longer need to be enforced (this is a throwaway statement because it goes to the very definition of what a norm is). Some Native American groups in the Pacific Northwest use talking sticks. As long as a speaker holds the talking stick, the listeners have to do just that: listen (Shearer, 2000). To protect the group from abuse, the norm may set a limit on the time a speaker may hold the stick. Although the stick is a symbol, and not an instrument of physical norm-enforcement (as in “hitting”), it can be a tool of great force. Talking sticks have been used with good effect in school education (Hartina, 2020). Corporate boards and faculty meetings have yet to discover their power.