• When people work for me, I supervise them closely.
• It is important to pay attention to the details at work.
Why these statements? Hogan says that he pulled them out of his hat (actually, he used a more colorful expression), but that’s only partly true. As someone who has been developing personality surveys for decades, Hogan now has an almost innate sense of what kinds of questions will pinpoint the various types of personalities. Although it may seem a little hit-or-miss, this is how most new survey instruments are developed.
Hogan’s initial thought was to have people respond to each statement with either “agree” or “disagree,” but Paul Connolly had a different idea. Connolly is the president of Performance Programs, a company that uses Hogan surveys in its work with corporate human resource departments. Connolly says that the test would be more informative if there were a 5-point scale: 5 means you strongly agree with the statement, 1 means you strongly disagree.
From June 16 to June 30, 2010, Hogan slipped these statements into his development survey, and as a result, 2,399 people were unwitting test subjects who assessed the usefulness of what we’ll call the Hogan Annoying Inventory (HAI). The initial data show several important things. First, there was a good spread of responses on each statement. If everybody had responded “strongly agree” to the statement “It is important to pay attention to details at work,” it wouldn’t be a very good statement for separating annoying from not-annoying people. The other thing the first data show is that the responses correlate with other qualities that the Hogan survey measures. According to this initial sample, an annoying person is pretty neurotic, pretty impulsive, and quite outgoing and talkative. In other words, a poorly adjusted extrovert. Yeah, that sounds about right.
It’s hard to know whether the HAI really measures someone’s annoyingness. Validating any new inventory is 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.”
11. Better Late Than Never Doesn’t Apply Here
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 (song) entails another’s fear (metagu); someone’s experiencing grief and frustration creates compassion/love/sadness (fago) in others,” wrote Lutz about the Ifaluk islanders.{38}
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 tipmochmoch, the annoyance that comes with feeling ill. There’s lingeringer, the annoyance that builds from a series of minor but unwanted events. There’s nguch, the annoyance with relatives who do the Ifaluk equivalent of failing to show up for a holiday dinner. Best of all, there’s tang, which Lutz describes as the frustration that occurs “in the face of personal misfortunes and slights which one is helpless to redress.”
Another important word for communicating annoyance is song. It’s what Lutz calls justifiable anger. Basically, it means, “You’ve done something that pisses me off. I know it, and you know it. But because expressing that annoyance would be inappropriate, I’ll let it go, and so will you.” It’s sort of a twist on the Western concept of forgive-and-forget, but it’s more like not-forgive-and-forget.