Boring People

How Not to Be Boring

My mother-in-law loves houses.

Our town is quite old, for an American city. Most of the houses were built in the 1800’s, and just about every single one of them is under perpetual renovation. Her house, our house, our entire town is filled with grand Victorian houses with sagging rooflines, crumbling foundations, and peeling paint.

The well-maintained ones look something like this. Image courtesy of Austin

To her credit, my mother in law is very industrious when it comes to the renovation and upkeep of her house. She paints her rooms to an exacting standard, visits antique shops to find vintage furniture, and washes every dish in the kitchen by hand. The kinds of mundane chores that make me wither fill her heart with a soft, warm glow.

Whenever I visit my mother in law, she eagerly invites me to see the new chairs, or a new light fixture, or new curtains, or a new counter. Every time she comes inside our own house, she gushes over the new sink, or the new ceiling tiles, or the new bathtub. Every time I drive my mother-in-law past a certain house on the block, she exclaims about the latest renovations.

Eventually I began to decline invitations to come into some room in her house and see whatever was being done there. Eventually, as we drove, I’d ask her to please stop pestering me to slow down and look at a house, to drive her to a different house for her to look at, or to give my opinion on some house that I wasn’t looking at. But I gradually realized that she didn’t listen to any of this. She gave me strange looks, thinking (I now realize) “He must be worn out taking care of everyone,” or “He must be very busy indeed,” or maybe just “What a jerk.”

It wasn’t until one moment that things finally clicked for her. It was as I was hurrying to cook for one of my family members or another, and everyone else who might distract her had moved out of earshot, that she turned to me, saying, “Don’t you just love these new something something your kitchen?”

In a comic expression of exasperation, I put my hands to my ears and wailed, “Why do you always talk about these mundane physical things? Everything you say is always ‘this fan,’ ‘this knife.’ Don’t you have any other interests, any inner life? Why do you never talk about art, or music?”

She finally got it. Chagrined, she immediately took our car and drove to Generic Shopping Mart™ where she could buy more things for her house.

This is the Essence of Boring People

The essence of boring people is that they are excited about things no one else cares about, AND THEY HAVE NO IDEA.

Lots of us would also be very boring to everyone around us, because we love all kinds of boring things, but we (mostly) know they’re boring to everyone else. That’s the only thing—that glimmer of bemused awareness that other people just might not be interested in the things we love—that’s the only thing that saves us. Mostly.

Talking to my wife about her mother, Mrs. Apple Pie expressed a kind of indignant disbelief that her mother could be so pushy about such mundane things. “Doesn’t she know nobody cares about that?”

But she doesn’t. To my mother-in-law, the merest idea that most of her family just nods politely when she talks about these things would be completely baffling. For her, everyone is interested in her new soap dish.

Everyone.

Scientists Investigate Stereotypes of Boring People

So you might think everybody would just have way better things to do than even attempt a systematic investigation of the most tragically boring among us. But as we always say: It is for science.

At least, that’s what a team of researchers said this year when they set out, to investigate stereotypes about boring people. Maybe some of them, smarting from a recent rejection on Tinder, or chilled by the pointed silence of their Uber driver, had a personal stake in the issue; on that point we can only speculate. But the results are actually pretty interesting.

Past lines of research have checked our stereotypes about boring people, finding that most of us think

• Boring people don’t show any interest in what you’re saying,

• Boring people are banal, repeating the same jokes or obsessing over a single topic,

• Boring people tend to just acknowledge you said something rather than saying anything back, and

• Boring people share relatively few personal experiences.¹

This last finding is surprising to me. Aren’t Narcissists boring? Well, maybe if they obsess over themselves as a single topic, but otherwise… maybe not!

The latest study I’ve seen in 2023² continued in this vein, finding the stereotypical hobbies of boring people include, in increasing order: stamp collecting, studying, drinking, mathematics (hey!), birdwatching, TV, church and religion, and at the very worst, sleeping. If your hobbies are on this list, well for crying out loud, don’t tell anyone about it! I’m glad to reassure my readers that I never sleep, and I certainly won’t be blogging about math anytime soon.³

Least boring hobbies were writing, gardening, domestic tasks, reading, and playing games. The low boredom level from tasks like baking, walking the dog, and cleaning leaves me flabbergasted, but that’s what the study found. Maybe deep down everyone really does realize the spiritual significance of apple pie? (Or maybe skydiving, archaeology, vigilantism, ninjutsu, and psychokinesis just weren’t included in the study, whatever)

But of course hobbies are exciting. They’re supposed to be exciting, or at least interesting. Work is much worse. If you work in banking, cleaning, taxes or insurance, accounting, or worst of all, data entry,⁴ consider other employment.

But with so many other professions, which to choose? Fortunately I can report the least boring occupations were found to include engineers, teachers, doctors and dentists, journalists, scientists, and at the very top, artists and performers. Broadly speaking, yours truly works in one of these professions, which explains the wild popularity of this blog.

The Crime of Being a Bore

Subjects in the 2023 study above were given a description of three people:

1. a person with boring hobbies, employment, and other characteristics,

2. an intermediate person, and

3. a person with stereotypically unboring traits

Then they were asked what it would be like to know these people. Asked about the least boring person, respondents tended to say “I would like to introduce this person to my friends,” “I would like to befriend or follow this person on social media,” and “If this person were to contact me by phone then I would be likely to call back.” And the most boring? “It would take me effort to hang out with this person,” and “I would be willing to lie that I don’t have time to avoid being with this person.” (The differences between each one were significant at p < 0.05, for those of you who realize how exciting p-values are)

This study followed previous work finding that group stereotypes fit into a two-dimensional space of competence and warmth. Competent groups are stereotyped as skillful, intelligent, capable, and confident; warm groups are stereotyped as trustworthy, friendly, good-natured, and sincere. When the three hypothetical people were rated on competence and wamth, this is how their scores turned out:

Whether boring people actually are cold and incompetent isn’t what they found. Instead, what they found is that people seen as boring are also seen as cold and incompetent. There’s probably an element of justice to the situation—people who genuinely are capable and good-natured do seem the sort that would be more popular, overall. Yet I’d be surprised if all those churchgoing, birdwatching people working in data entry really are incapable or unfriendly. More likely to me is their unpopularity hangs upon them like a weight, stamping the impression of incompetence and unfriendliness onto their faces.

But That’s Just Stereotypes. What Are Boring People Actually Like?

The easiest way I know of to answer this question relies on older research. It turns out that adjectives like “dull” are among the very best for describing introverts.⁵ So if you can imagine being shy, withdrawn, quiet, reserved, and unenthusiastic about stuff, you can probably imagine what it’s like for people to find you boring. (Sorry, introverts. I know from experience that when we get to know you, you can actually be very interesting! But it does take a while, though.)

You might also have heard people use “dull” as a euphamism to describe those special people who aren’t too bright, but that only holds for anyone who has to deal with them in real life. Stupid people can be hilarious on TV.

Speaking of comedy, studies that investigate political values usually find conservatives aren’t very funny,⁶⁷ probably because conservatives are lower in Openness to Experience, a trait of originality and imagination which facilitates humor.⁸⁹ This is a terribly unfair handicap on conservatives—unfunny people are definitely boring.

To be fair, though, it may be worse to be annoying the way Woke liberals are. And let’s face it, not all conservatives are boring:

During the 2016 campaign, Trump explained that being “presidential” was boring. He didn’t plan to be boring, he told his rally crowds, though he could be as presidential as anyone…

Now I do know that my readers are clever people and full of their own interpretations of the world around them. But to me—to me—this encapsulates the entire Trump phenomenon. Trump was definitely not boring (as, say, certain other presidents are), and his entertainment value lay in no small part in hilarious claims like these, that he could be “presidential.” (But even he’ll never trump that line about Mexico paying for it.) This may explain why I liked Donald Trump way, way better than most liberals; Trump made me laugh.

But for better or for worse, it’s over now.

With the election of Joe Biden, the American people have united to declare with one proud voice that Never Again shall Our Great Nation have an Interesting President.

Or at least, not for a few years.

In Conclusion

Don’t be boring!

1. Leary, M. R., Rogers, P. A., Canfield, R. W., & Coe, C. (1986). Boredom in interpersonal encounters: Antecedents and social implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 968–975. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.5.968

2. van Tilburg, W. A., Igou, E. R., & Panjwani, M. (2023). Boring people: Stereotype characteristics, interpersonal attributions, and social reactions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(9), 1329-1343.

3. (Does a week count as a long time? I’ll give it a week)

4. There’s a reason why Nikolai Golgol made the famous Akaky Akakyevich a copyist; until he receives his Overcoat, Akaky is the quintessential bore. (That link is a hint, by the way—reading is a less boring hobby than whatever else you were doing, and if you act now, reading Ukrainian authors will even make you seem exciting for as long as current sociopolitical rules apply!)

5. Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2008). The HEXACO personality factors in the indigenous personality lexicons of English and 11 other languages. Journal of personality, 76(5), 1001-1054.

6. Silvia, P. J., Christensen, A. P., & Cotter, K. N. (2021). Right-wing authoritarians aren't very funny: RWA, personality, and creative humor production. Personality and Individual Differences, 170, 110421.

7. Young, D. G., Bagozzi, B. E., Goldring, A., Poulsen, S., & Drouin, E. (2019). Psychology, political ideology, and humor appreciation: Why is satire so liberal?. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 8(2), 134.

8. Sutu, A., Phetmisy, C. N., & Damian, R. I. (2021). Open to laugh: The role of openness to experience in humor production ability. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 15(3), 401.

9. Nusbaum, E. C., Silvia, P. J., & Beaty, R. E. (2017). Ha ha? Assessing individual differences in humor production ability. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(2), 231.