<
https://theconversation.com/women-get-fewer-chances-to-speak-on-cnn-fox-news-and-msnbc-according-to-an-ai-powered-large-scale-analysis-of-interruptions-190321>
"My colleagues and I used artificial intelligence to analyze hundreds of
thousands of dialogues on cable news programs in order to better understand the
nature of interruptions in political discussions. We found that women get
substantially fewer opportunities to speak in those settings than men, and
perhaps as a result they tend to interrupt more often than men.
Analyzing interruptions at this scale provides meaningful insights into subtle
conversational dynamics and how they vary across race, gender, occupation and
political orientation. In addition to gender differences, we found that across
CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, conversations between people who hold opposite
political beliefs are riddled with far more intrusive and unfriendly
interruptions than those between people who share a political affiliation.
I’m a computer scientist who uses AI to study social science questions. In
collaboration with student AI researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, we
developed AI methods that reliably distinguish intrusive and unfriendly
interruptions from those that are benign. Intrusive interruptions aim to take
over a conversation or stifle the speaker, and benign interruptions aim to
support the speaker with helpful information or indications of agreement.
Through a year-long effort, we analyzed 625,409 dialogues containing
interruptions found in 275,420 transcripts from the three cable news networks
spanning January 2000 and July 2021. We found that female speakers on the
networks got out an average of 72.8 words per chance to speak compared to 81.4
for male speakers. We also found that female speakers interrupted in 39.4% of
dialogues compared to 35.9% for male speakers. However, the women had a better
ratio of benign to intrusive interruptions than the men did: 85.5% to 75.4%."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
