If anything is worse than being bored then it is people thinking that you are boring. Since the past 15 years, social psychologist Wijnand Van Tilburg has researched on boredom, to understand its repercussions. It turns out that boredom is very interesting.
Boredom has negative impacts- bored folks become extremely negative and aggressive towards others as it makes them feel better about them. Boredom pushes people to not try interesting things in their life, that they find meaningful or valuable. Feeling bored leads to nostalgia as people find interest in thinking about the past.
In a study named Boring People: Stereotype Characteristics, Interpersonal Attributions, and Social Reactions, Tilburg studied about gaining a deeper understanding of what makes people 'boring'. To conduct the research, Tilburg and his team asked more than 500 people about the careers and hobbies that they felt were boring. They asked them to list all the charactersitics they associated with people in such jobs.
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Volunteers said that data analysis, accounting, tax/insurance, cleaning, and banking were the most boring jobs. They found scientists exciting even though a large part of what a scientist works on is data analysis. The most boring hobbies were sleeping, religion, watching TV, observing animals, and doing math. According to the volunteers, boring people do not have interests and do not have opinions.
People with such characteristics were known to be cold and incompetent. Boring people were also known to talk a lot or talk less.
