People who constantly cut others off mid-sentence tend to get written off as simply rude, but the psychology behind interrupting turns out to be more layered than that. Two studies, one looking at how interrupters are actually perceived and one looking at what interrupting does to the person being cut off, help explain why the habit persists even though most people say they hate being on the receiving end of it.
The clearest evidence on perception comes from a 2008 study by Sara Farley, published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. In the first experiment, participants listened to an audiotaped conversation scripted with five interruptions and rated the interrupter and the interrupted speaker afterward. In the second, trained confederates interrupted unsuspecting participants live during a discussion task. Across both experiments, interrupters were consistently rated as having more status and influence than the people they interrupted, who in turn rated themselves as less influential in the exchange. But that gain in perceived power came at a real cost: interrupters were liked significantly less than non-interrupters, and the drop in likeability was especially pronounced for women who interrupted, even though they gained the same status boost as men did.
A second, older study helps show what interrupting actually does to the substance of a conversation, not just how it’s perceived. In a 1984 study by Howard Beckman and Richard Frankel, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the researchers audio-recorded 74 real physician-patient office visits and timed how long patients were allowed to speak when describing why they’d come in. Physicians interrupted patients’ opening statements after a mean of just 18 seconds, and only 23 percent of patients were ever allowed to finish their initial statement without being cut off. Once interrupted, patients rarely circled back to complete their original concern, meaning the interruption didn’t just feel abrupt, it often permanently changed what information made it into the conversation at all.
Together, these two studies suggest that interrupting operates as a kind of trade people make, often without realizing it. Farley’s research shows that interrupting reliably signals dominance and confidence to observers, which is likely part of why the habit persists in the first place, it does convey something people read as authority. But Beckman and Frankel’s research shows that this apparent gain in the moment can come with a real, practical cost to whoever gets cut off: once interrupted, people often simply don’t return to finish what they were saying, so the interrupted point is lost rather than just delayed. Put together, interrupting looks less like a simple manners problem and more like a pattern that quietly reshapes both how a person is seen and what actually gets said.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Farley’s research was conducted with scripted or confederate-driven interruptions in structured experimental settings, so it can’t fully capture how perceptions of a habitual, unscripted interrupter in an ongoing relationship might differ from a one-time interruption by a stranger. Beckman and Frankel’s research is specific to physician-patient visits, a setting with its own particular time pressures and power dynamics, so while it’s a striking and well-documented pattern, it may not generalize cleanly to interruptions between friends, partners, or coworkers where the incentives and stakes look different.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a more specific picture than “interrupting is just impolite.” It appears to genuinely function as a status move, one that reads as confidence to onlookers, while simultaneously costing the interrupter likeability and costing the interrupted person the chance to finish saying what they meant to say. Recognizing that tradeoff, rather than just the surface-level rudeness of it, may be the more useful reason to catch the habit before it becomes automatic.
