![]() ![]() Things can be annoying without having that quality. But if the delay is undetermined, and it's 10 minutes and nothing's happened, and it's 20 minutes and nothing's happened, then the irritation begins to grow. You look at your watch, you might get a little impatient, but you're not necessarily going to get annoyed because you know that in 10 minutes you're going to take off. ![]() ![]() There's this element of, if you know that the delay on a particular airline flight is going to be 10 minutes, then pfff …10 minutes. So it has to have this quality of "you're trapped and can't get away."Īnd then the third "u" is uncertain duration. ![]() But they're not annoying if somebody's just walking past you in the street. We talk about cell phone conversations being annoying. If you can get away from it, it's not annoying. The other thing is, it's something unpredictable. I suppose if a skunk sprayed you in the eyeball that would be bad, but mainly just, "Ugh, I don't like this very much." They may be unpleasant, but they're not harmful, in general. We define annoyances as being essentially trivial. But I think the key part is that it's not deadly. So with that caveat I'll say that one of the things that seems to be a factor in is that it has to be unpleasant. I don't know how you put the smell of a skunk, the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, someone clipping his nails and overhearing a cell phone conversation into one definition of what is annoying - but each one of those things is annoying in itself. This was sort of an interesting inquiry into an area that hadn't really been looked at. I think if I had handed this book in as a graduate thesis, I wouldn't have graduated. This is where my academic training either helps or gets in the way, depending on how you want to think about it. So is there a "universal theory of annoyingness?" That's why it was hard to come up with these universal laws about what makes something annoying. You know, if I give somebody a $10, and get $3.75 back, they just hand the whole thing to me instead of going one, two, three." And I thought, "What?" I never did get to the bottom of that one.īut there's just no way of predicting this. And I feel like I never quite measured up." And I thought, isn't that interesting? Because it really does prove one of the things we talk about in the book, which is that what annoys you is more revealing about you than about the thing that's annoying you.Īnother one, which I didn't even quite understand, was when somebody said, "It really bothers me when they don't count change into my palm. Because my first question was, "Well, who does this? Does that happen to you a lot?" I asked her that, and she said, "Well, you know, it's usually my family." "Mmm, OK, so why?" "Well, they were always very fastidious about dressing and going out ironed and creased and combed. And I thought, "Picked lint off?" I couldn't even remember anybody doing that to me.īut it actually opened a whole interesting area of inquiry. I like the ones that are like, "Whaaa? Why does that annoy you?" One that just blew me away was when we were doing a talk show and someone called in and said it really annoyed her when people picked lint off her clothes. I'm sure that as you were writing this book, you heard from a million people about their annoyances. Palca and Lichtman talked to psychologists, neuroscientists and other researchers to find out what annoys us, why we get annoyed and what's happening in our brains when our irritation rises.Īlong the way, they pulled together diverse strands of research into what just might become a new field of scientific inquiry. He and co-author Flora Lichtman, multimedia editor at NPR's "Science Friday," tackle a universal but perhaps understudied topic: annoyance. Now, in his first book "Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us," Palca has returned to his behavioral science roots. But before he became a science journalist, Palca spent several years as a sleep researcher and earned a PhD in psychology at the University of California–Santa Cruz. Over his nearly two decades at NPR, he's covered topics as diverse as space shuttles, medical research and basic physics. You may know Joe Palca as one of the voices of science on National Public Radio. ![]()
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