tricky, says Georgine Pion, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University. One way is to have a panel of experts rate people for how annoying they are and then give them the HAI and see how well the results compare with the expert ratings. There are problems with this approach, however. You have to get a group of people who are willing to be judged for how annoying they are. Or you can lie to people and tell them you are actually measuring something else and hope to heck they never find out the truth. Then there’s the problem of choosing the expert. There are no “experts” to choose from, in part because annoyingness is so subjective, and in part because it’s a young scientific field.
Pion says that another approach is to ask people to evaluate the statements in the survey. For example, how annoying would someone be if she possessed the trait “My moods can change quickly”? That was easier to start with, so on July 26, 2010, 265 people were e-mailed a survey that included a list of traits based on the HAI and were asked how annoying people with those traits would be on a scale from not annoying at all to extremely annoying. A total of 134 people returned the survey. The trait that people found most annoying on average was “People who think they are better at what they do than almost anyone.” Surprisingly, the least annoying trait was judged to be “People who have very high standards for work performance.”
Some curious things emerged from these two efforts to validate the HAI. Even though “People who think they are better at what they do than almost anyone” was considered an annoying trait, the related statement “I am better at what I do than almost anyone” showed almost no correlation with whether people thought of themselves as annoying.
People find arrogance annoying, but the arrogant don’t think of themselves as annoying. On one level, that’s not surprising: arrogant people think only good things about themselves. Still, here’s what this really seems to mean: people who are annoying don’t realize they’re annoying.
The statement that most closely tracked with self-ratings of annoyingness was “When I want to, I can turn on the charm.” Yet that same trait, “People who can turn on the charm,” was not regarded as annoying in the pilot study.
The survey suggests something that most of us probably suspect intuitively: it’s really hard to know whether you’re annoying, and if you do annoy someone, it’s extremely hard to figure out why.
*The bartender says, “We don’t serve strings here. Get out.” The second string goes up to the bartender and says, “A Bloody Mary, please.” The bartender says, “Didn’t you hear what I told your friend? We don’t serve strings here. Get out.” Seeing this, the third string goes into the bathroom, unravels his ends, and ties himself in a bow. Then he goes out to the bar and says to the bartender, “I’d like a martini, please, straight up, with a twist.” The bartender looks at him suspiciously. “Are you a string?” he asks. “No, I’m a frayed knot.”
Ifaluk is a coral atoll in the Yap State of the Federated States of Micronesia. It’s one of the Caroline Islands. Never heard of it? Not surprising. It’s tiny. Its land mass is about half the size of Central Park in New York City. Approximately six hundred people live there.
It rains a lot in Ifaluk, something in the neighborhood of one hundred inches per year, about three times the average for Seattle. Every so often a typhoon sweeps by, flattening the island. Ifaluk isn’t easy to get to. Looked at another way, it isn’t easy to leave.
So, let’s say you were a psychologist interested in studying annoyance, and you wanted to create a pressure cooker of a situation where the conditions were challenging, the population fixed, and the opportunities for escape negligible. It sounds as if Ifaluk might be your natural laboratory. Yet when anthropologist Catherine Lutz visited Ifaluk in the late 1970s, she found something remarkable. No one seemed to be annoyed about anything. Not just a few serene people. Everyone. All the time. Calm as could be. And it wasn’t because annoyances didn’t exist. They abounded. How could this be? How can conditions that would surely be insanely annoying to an American not trouble the residents of Ifaluk one tiny bit?
Lutz’s explanation is that emotions are shaped by culture. Most of the time, we tend to think of emotions as something we’re born with. Lutz, however, believes that this is not the right way to think about emotions. She says that they are set by the way we are raised and by the expectations that are placed on us from day one. What’s more, emotions are not so much individual traits but properties that emerge from communities, from interactions with other people. According to this idea, you don’t typically have emotions in isolation. “One person’s anger (
So, rather than show anger or frustration or annoyance, the people of Ifaluk use their words to express their feelings. They have a rich vocabulary to express a variety of states of annoyance. There’s
Another important word for communicating annoyance is
Lutz wasn’t the first to uncover a society where annoyance was anathema. In the 1960s, an anthropologist named Jean Briggs spent more than a year with the Utkuhikhalingmiut[3] Eskimos in northern Canada. She persuaded one of the families to essentially adopt her so that she could experience, as well as study, the culture.
Like the Ifaluk, the Utkuhikhalingmiut frowned on expressions of negative emotion. Indeed, someone who showed even a trace of annoyance faced silence, loneliness, and rejection—something Briggs learned the hard way. She made the mistake of saying something to a fisherman who had damaged an Utkuhikhalingmiut fishing net. She had to endure months of the silent treatment, a distressing experience.
The notion that emotions are shaped by culture is becoming widely accepted by people who study such things, and it explains a lot about why Americans find people from other countries annoying, and vice versa.
Hazel Rose Markus is a psychologist at Stanford University and the director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In 1991, she and Shinobu Kitayama wrote a seminal paper titled “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” In it, they said,
In America, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” In Japan, “the nail that stands out gets pounded down.” American parents who are trying to induce their children to eat their suppers are fond of saying “think of the starving kids in Ethiopia, and appreciate how lucky you are to be different from them.” Japanese parents are likely to say “Think about the farmer who worked so hard to produce this rice for you; if you don’t eat it, he will feel bad, for his efforts will have been in vain.”… A small Texas corporation seeking to elevate productivity told its employees to look in the mirror and say “I am beautiful” 100 times before coming to work each day. Employees of a Japanese supermarket that was recently opened in New Jersey were instructed to begin the day by holding hands and telling each other that “he” or “she is beautiful.”
Markus and Kitayama argue that these contrary points of view help illuminate a fundamental difference in how Eastern and Western cultures conceive of what psychologists call “self.” Your concept of self determines how you perceive and respond to your environment.
In the Western world—at least, in the parts of the Western world that Markus has studied—you are supposed to be in control of your environment. “You think about yourself as independent, separate from others,” says Markus. “You should be in charge of your actions, you should be freely making choices, and you should be influencing your world. Control is key. And when you can’t have that kind of influence over your environment, over other people, over
