Turn Taking Looks Fair And Quietly Favours The Confident

Nobody hands out turns, which is the problem.

A conversation among more than two people runs on a system nobody agreed to. Turns are not allocated, they are taken, and they go to whoever is quickest to start speaking when a gap appears. That sounds neutral. It is not, because the willingness to start speaking into an uncertain gap is unevenly distributed. Some people will begin talking before they know how the sentence ends. Others wait until they are sure the floor is free, and by then it is not. Over an hour the difference compounds into one person having spoken six times and another not at all, with everyone assuming this reflects how much each had to say.

The person who did not speak usually knows exactly what happened. They had the thought, waited for the gap, found the gap taken, revised the thought, waited again, and eventually the topic moved on and the thought expired. Doing that four or five times in a row is tiring, and the tiredness reads from the outside as disengagement. Meanwhile the frequent speaker often leaves believing it was a lively conversation with good contributions all round. Both experiences are honest. The mechanism producing them is invisible to the person it favours, which is what makes it worth writing down.

There are two useful responses depending on which side you are on. If you tend to hold back, decide before the gap rather than during it, and start with something structural such as saying you want to come back to an earlier point. Beginning a sentence is easier than composing one and beginning it at once. If you tend to fill gaps, count one beat before you speak, and when someone starts and gets cut off, hand it back by name. Nothing else you do in a group conversation will be noticed and appreciated as much as returning a turn to the person who lost it.