Study Says Egocentrics Are Most Boring

NEW YORK--Researchers are studying an acute social disease whose victims at one time or another afflict almost everyone around them: bores.

The scientists are looking at why some people are boring, in what ways they can be boring, and just how boring can they get. They've even established a "boringness index."

Among other things, their studies suggest that, to those who have to listen to them, people who complain about themselves and mutter trivialities are worse than people who overuse slang or try too hard to be nice.

They also found that boring conversation tends to include more questions and utterances like "Uh-huh," with fewer statements of fact or self-disclosure, than more interesting talk.

The experiments are among the first in an area that could lead to help for "chronically and excessively boring persons," the researchers wrote in the November issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"We're all boring sometimes and we're all interesting sometimes [but] some people are more boring than others," said Mark Leary, assistant psychology professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., co-author of the report with three students.

The work may sound tedious but it's "a first step in a whole new direction that we need to know more about," said Harry Reis, psychology professor at the University of Rochester in New York.

The experiments were based on a survey of undergraduate students and analyses of brief conversations between undergraduates who had just met. More work will be needed to see if the conclusions apply to other kinds of people and situations, Leary said.

In one experiment, 42 students suggested 210 tiresome things other people do that bore them, which researchers distilled into 43 themes for a second survey of 297 students.

That survey found that the most boring behaviors were banality, such as talking about trivial or superficial things or showing interest in only one topic, and "negative egocentrism," which essentially meant complaining about oneself and showing disinterest in others.

The least objectionable behaviors were "boring ingratiation," or trying to be funny and nice to impress others, and a mixture of distracting behaviors such as going off on tangents or overusing small talk or slang, such as:

"Hey wow, man, this was far out, it was too cool," Leary said in a telephone interview. "It gets a little old."

A second study focused on five-minute conversations between 52 pairs of strangers. Transcripts were reviewed by 12 undergraduates who rated a randomly chosen person in each conversation for boringness. That person's conversation also was studied for grammatical form and communicative intent, and the results compared to his "boringness index."

You might get tired of people who talk on and on and on, but the study found that more boring people tended to talk less. In addition, their conversation tended to have higher proportions of questions and of simple acknowledgements that they were listening, such as "uh-huh."

"They were not reporting their own feelings and attitudes and opinions as much as the less boring people were," Leary said. And they made fewer statements of fact, he said.