Although little direct research has been conducted on the topic, there’s no shortage of relevant data: science has a lot to say about annoyance. In our quest to understand this feeling, we came across some patterns that help explain what makes something annoying. Don’t expect a proof for a Grand Unified Theory of Annoyance; this is a scientific field in its infancy. We offer our findings as a place to start.
Introduction: Cell Phones
It can happen to anyone, at any time, in any place—in public bathrooms, on trains, in schools, even in your own backyard. You’re never safe. For Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, it happened at the gym. “There was a young woman on the treadmill next to mine who was talking on her cell phone, and I was doing my best to tune it out, but she kept saying the same sentence over and over and over again. It was something like, ‘He’s arriving tomorrow.’ I think she must have said it like ten or twelve times.”
This is a classic case of cell phone annoyance. Liberman couldn’t ignore the broken record on the treadmill next to him, and that was annoying. Why? Maybe it was annoying because talking on a cell phone when you’re in a public space is rude.
Why is it rude? Lauren Emberson, a psychology graduate student who studied this, has an answer. “I think the reason why is that we can’t tune it out. We find it more rude than someone having a conversation around us because our attention is drawn in and that makes us irritated that we can’t be doing the other things or thinking about the other things that we want to. That’s why it seems intrusive.”
It’s an interesting idea: what we find rude is what we cannot ignore. In terms of cell phone conversations, Liberman points out that some will be harder to ignore than others—louder conversations will be more annoying, and the content of certain conversations may be more attention grabbing.