[imagesource: Freepik]
Have you ever felt a yawn coming on when finding out that the person you’ve just said hi to at the bar is in data analysis or banking?
Then that person mentions that they enjoy sleeping or TV in their free time, and your legs feel like they might give way to a full-on snoozefest if you don’t walk away first.
Well, science is backing up these feelings of boredom.
Psychologists and social scientists from the University of Essex, University of Limerick, and the London School of Economics have pinpointed the markers of what makes a person stereotypically boring.
After examining 500 people across five individual studies, the researchers published the findings in a study.
Here’s more from Business Insider:
They first asked participants to list the occupations, hobbies and characteristics they deemed to be most boring.
People working in data analysis, accounting, tax/insurance cleaning, and banking were listed as having the most boring professions.
Sleeping, religion, TV, watching animals, and mathematics, were seen to be the five most boring hobbies, by participants.
According to the study, the world’s most boring person combines all the dullest aspects of life into one: a religious data entry worker who likes watching TV and lives in a town, per Tech Explorist.
This is obviously not good news for said boring people, who as a consequence of being a snooze, can end up battling stigma, ostracisation, addiction, and mental health issues.
Researchers analysed the potential impact of being dull, and how it could affect a person’s relationships with colleagues and peers:
It’s potentially negative. Participants were more likely to want to avoid peers deemed to be highly boring. When asked, hypothetically, how much they would expect as compensation were they asked to spend time with a boring person, the average answer was $35 (R500) a day.
Wijnand Van Tilburg, the senior lecturer at the University of Essex’s department of psychology and co-author of the study, said that the “irony is studying boredom is very interesting” as it has very real consequences:
“Perceptions can change, but people may not take time to speak to those with ‘boring’ jobs and hobbies, instead choosing to avoid them. They don’t get a chance to prove people wrong and break these negative stereotypes. The fact that people avoid them can lead to social ostracization and increase loneliness leading to a negative impact on their lives.”
To add to the reality of being ostracised, boring people were also deemed to be generally less competent in the study:
Dr. Van Tilburg said, “It was interesting to see that the study showed that boring people were not seen as competent. I would have thought that accountants would be seen as boring but effective and the perfect person to do a good job on your tax return. The truth is that people like bankers and accountants are highly capable and have power in society – perhaps we should try not to upset them and stereotype them as boring.”
It is one thing to fight back an initial yawn when someone mentions their ultra boring profession, but if that person mentions sleep as a hobby, well, hopefully, they have interesting dreams to talk about.
You have to give something for an interesting conversation to work…
[sources:businessinsider&techexplorist]
