Hope for Turning Boring Stiffs Into Live Wires
You say your big date nodded off during that candlelight rendezvous and ended up nose-down in her banana daiquiri? That tables empty in the company cafeteria when you walk up with your tray? That your Phone Mate has finally quit talking to you, and you can’t even get invited to a Gary Hart fund-raiser?
Well, stop me if you’ve heard this one, but you may be among the nation’s “chronically boring” people. The odds are even greater if you work in Washington, where ennui is c’est la vie, and one out of five folks ends up as the moral equivalent of Teflon.
But now, thanks to the miracle of social psychology, there’s a dim glimmer of hope. A research team at Wake Forest University recently turned its formidable analytic eye on the problem, hoping to discern the “basic behavioral dimensions that others regard as boring.”
Heretofore, admittedly, this question had not unduly troubled mankind. Savants and laymen alike have felt that they had a pretty firm grasp on the concept ever since the first aboriginal twit grunted, “OOORK. Hot enough for you?”
And as the affliction spread over yawning millennia--reaching epidemic scope in regions such as ours--science remained obstinately indifferent to the matter.
But that was before the November issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where Prof. Mark R. Leary and his three co-authors revealed their findings to a breathless world.
They had begun with a daring hypothesis: “Boredom is an affective consequence of effortful maintenance of attention to a particular stimulus event.” (That is, the feeling we get when we have to work hard to pay attention to someone or something--like, say, an English sentence in a learned journal.)
Studies Conducted
In a fury of investigatory zeal, Leary et al. conducted three separate studies.
For the first, they interrogated 50 undergraduates and came up with an “item pool” of 43 boring behaviors such as talking slowly, little eye contact and rambling. Then 297 other students ranked those behaviors for bore power on a scale of 1 to 5.
The data was then given a state-of-the-art mathematical massage: subjected, the researchers write, to “principal axis factor analysis,” tossed onto a “scree plot” and finally reduced to nine prime categories. Both “oblique and orthogonal rotations were performed,” the oil was changed and the carburetor adjusted, and at last “a varimax-rotated factor structure” was arrived at.
They found nine prime factors: passivity; tediousness (vocal style); distracting mannerisms; low “affectivity” (animation); “boring ingratiation” (“trying to be funny and nice in order to impress other people”); seriousness (no smiles); negative egocentrism (“being negative” and “talking about one’s problems”); self-preoccupation; and banality (“hackneyed and trite” manner, narrow interests, repeating the same material).
When the Wake Forest team computed the “mean boredom rating” for each factor, negative egocentrism and banality came out as most odious--just as they are every day on C-Span, down at the Bureau of Staplers or over at Tortson, Rummage & Bilkem.
You don’t have to be orthogonally rotated to get the picture here. Even if your idea of a good time is memorizing the table of molecular weights, you can still improve.
Ways to Change
To elude negative egocentrism, don’t blame “the irresponsibility of the press” for your problems. Don’t obsessively repeat the same phrases, such as saying “I decline to answer” two or three times in a row. And above all, try to avoid banal cliches like “Let the chips fall where they may,” or “Let’s go forward together.”
Then take a quick inventory of your conversational interests. Which of the following appeals to you as a suitable topic? The wholesale price index. Average yards gained rushing. The Law of the Sea. Highway on-ramp congestion. Nasal congestion. (If your score is 1 or more, you need to continue reading. If less, you are normal, but may now be unconscious: Do not attempt to drive or operate power machinery; if symptoms persist, see your newsman.)
The researchers went on in their second study to scrutinize the behaviors of persons in “dyadic interaction,” otherwise known as two people talking to each other.
To do so, they employed an eight-category roster of “verbal response modes” (“VRMs”) dividing speech into types such as disclosures (“declarative, first-person” utterances that “reveal thought, feelings, perceptions, intentions”), edifications (“third-person” statements of “objective information”) and reflections (“puts other’s experience into words”).
They then analyzed the contents of 52 tape-recorded conversations to probe potential correlations between boringness and VRMs.
By a substantial margin, conversants using higher percentages of questions (“requests information or guidance”) and acknowledgments (“contentless utterances; terms of address and salutation which convey receipt of other’s communication”) were found to be more boring. (David Hartman, call your office!)
The scientists were led to this breakthrough conclusion: “Boring subjects were less likely to respond in ways that others would find absorbing.”
Not content to rest there, the intrepid researchers burrowed ever deeper into the ancient bane.
The Third Study
Seventy-two students were asked to listen to one side of six conversations tape-recorded in stereo (with one speaker isolated on each channel), and to grade each “target” elocutor as to how much they had liked or disliked him, whether they had positive or negative impressions and so forth.
To the wholesale vindication of common sense, the researchers discovered that the borees had “aversive” reactions accompanied by “resentment” or “hostility.”
Which may explain why your social calendar looks like a map of Antarctica. But take heart.
As the researchers write, “One unexpected finding emerged: Boring targets were rated significantly more intelligent than interesting targets,” possibly because “subjects viewed boring targets as more critical” and “critical people are sometimes perceived as more intelligent.”
