Psychology 409B September 17,
2006
It’s just a Conversation
By: Michael Malala
Instructions for this activity are found at
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy25/g25-oral1.htm
Dr. Leon James
Tannen, Deborah (1996) Gender &
Discourse (
1. Indirectness
A. To beat around the
bush, to not be straight forward
B. Two benefits of
indirectness: defensiveness and rapport
C. Huge cross-cultural
differences around the world
D. Not a strategy of
subordination
2. Interruption “overlap”
A. Is a sign of dominance
B. People who overlap
cooperatively speak freely and don’t take offense to interruption
C. Overlap
resistant-speakers assume only one voice at a time should be heard
D. Any asymmetry in
the conversation results in domination
3. Silence Versus Volubility
A. “Powerful people do
the talking and powerless people are silenced”
B. Lengths of pauses,
some people allow only short pauses in conversations other allow for long ones
C. Researchers have proven men talk more than
women and therefore dominate the conversation
4. Topic Rising
A. An assumption that the speaker who raises
the most topics is dominating the conversation is not necessarily true
B. Usually the topics
being raised has to do with the other person in the conversation
C. The person raising
all the topics might just be nervous because of the length of the pauses in the conversation
5. Adversativeness: Conflict and Verbal
Aggression
A. Males: more likely
to engage in conflict and take sides
B. Females: more
likely to be cooperative and avoid conflict
C. Different cultures around the world like
Italian enjoy arguing or “verbal jousting”
Related Links:
No Interruptions
I found this article to be very true.
I do think that teaching kids not to interrupt adult conversations is
very important. My cousin has a younger
daughter and she constantly comes up to her and demands attention even when her
mother is engaged in a conversation. I
feel that if you teach a kid not to interrupt adult conversations they can
apply that knowledge to all conversations.
http://www.azcentral.com/families/articles/1220fam_parenting0913.html
Interruptions in Adolescent Girls’ Conversations
I like this article because it gives an alternative hypothesis to
interruptions in conversations. Previous
research showed that interruptions were correlated with dominant functions. Now
they are saying that it could just be conflict of conversation styles. It would be nice to take this study one step
further and add males to the equation. I
agree that there are a lot of different people out there with a lot of different
conversational styles. There’s no better
style to have, each one is unique.
http://jar.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/272
Men are from Earth, and So are Women
Men and women are different, biologically and cognitively. So it’s only
natural for men and women to have different conversation styles. 1974 Maccoby and Jacklin compared gender differences between men and women
and found only four areas where gender differences were evident verbal ability,
visual-spatial ability, mathematical ability, and aggression. I’m most
interested in the verbal ability differences, especially when it comes to
opposite sex conversations.
http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/668