Word: boringness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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.
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:
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."