What is Cooperative Overlap? Isn’t It Just Interrupting?

Cooperative Overlap (or Collaborative Overlap) is a term coined by Georgetown University professor of linguistics and author Deborah Tannen, in which the listener starts talking along with the speaker, not to cut them off but rather to validate or show they’re engaged in what the other person is saying.

In conversations, do you have a tendency to jump in before someone else is finished speaking? If so, what’s behind that? And how do you feel when it happens to you?

Conversational interruptions happen for a multitude of reasons, and your reaction to them may be very different depending on the circumstances. Sometimes they take the combative tone of political debates – arguing, redirecting, or ‘correcting’. Sometimes it’s that the listener hasn’t really been listening – or at least, stopped listening when they knew what they were going to say next and have just been waiting until they can jump in (if you notice yourself doing this, it can be an eye-opening – and humbling – experience). But sometimes it can take the form of “Conversational Overlap” – a term coined by Georgetown University professor of linguistics and author Deborah Tannen. Conversational Overlap (sometimes called Collaborative Overlap) is where the listener starts talking along with the speaker, not to cut them off but rather to validate or show they’re engaged in what the other person is saying; to amplify their voice rather than the listener’s own.

Tannen introduced the term in her 1984 book Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends but it reached a wider audience in 2021 following a viral TikTok video by user Sari Rachel – who describes herself as an “interrupty person” – and a resulting New York Times follow-up piece by Tannen.

Cooperative Overlap has been described as part of a culturally Jewish style of conversation, particularly common in the New York area (in fact, I first heard this conversational style labeled by a Jewish New Yorker), but it is also common in other cultural contexts, such as Eastern European, Mediterranean, Indian, South American, African and Arab cultures, to name a few. “Within each country, of course, there are many cultures, and not all have the same style,” Tannen has noted, and of course individuals or family groups outside of those cultures also engage in Cooperative Overlap.

Similar to open-ended questions, Cooperative Overlap can be used to encourage the speaker to continue – when used well, the overlapper is not editorializing, judging, or fixing what the speaker said – and the end result should be that the speaker feels empowered to continue.

The line is a fine one, though, and not always easy to distinguish to an outsider witnessing the conversation – and sometimes not even to the speaker in the conversation. Tannen says that among people who share the same communication style, cooperative overlapping often has the positive effect of “greasing rather than gumming up the conversational wheels.” Among those who do not, however, it can have the opposite effect. The speaker may become flustered, or feel disrespected. “They often assume that anyone who begins to talk while they are speaking is trying to take the floor,” Tannen said. “Often they will stop and feel interrupted.”

So how can you know this week if you’re participating in Cooperative Overlapping rather than just interrupting?

This Week’s Tip:

1. Day One: Focusing only on interactions you’re directly involved in, start by counting the number of times you interrupt others during a single day. You’ll use this as baseline data to simply become aware of how common it is.
2. Day Two: Again, focusing only on interactions you’re directly involved in, observe the response to your interruptions. Does the speaker continue in each case, or do they stop? Do they appear engaged and encouraged to say more?
3. Day Three: Work on honing your interruptions into Collaborative Overlapping or open-ended questions. Practice having a goal of not ‘making your point,’ but listening to theirs. After each conversation, find 30 seconds to yourself to reflect (and maybe jot down notes) on how that went.
4. Day Four: Use the Kaizen approach of continuous improvement through incremental change (which we’ll explore more fully in a future article) to ask what small changes you can make to your interruptions (which might include lessening them altogether) to support the intended outcomes of a conversation.

Try this out this week, and let us know how it goes! We’d love to hear from you.

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