The 'most boring' person in the world has been identified by a team of researchers from the University of Essex seeking to uncover the secrets behind the science of boredom... and don't worry dear reader, it's not you.
In fact, it's not anyone specifically, otherwise this team of researchers would have dedicated their time, effort and expertise into calling out one very unlucky person.
Instead, they researched what qualities a person had which could be seen as boring by others and created a profile of based off the data they gathered.
According to the Daily Mirror, the team studied the lifestyles of 500 people to discover what tallies with people's perceptions of what it means to be boring and what impacts being seen as boring could have on a person's life.
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The study was led by Dr Wijnand Van Tilburg of the University of Essex's department of psychology, who warned that people seen as boring can have 'a really negative impact on their lives' due to loneliness and 'may be at greater risk of harm, addiction and mental health issues'.
He said: 'Ironically studying boredom is actually very interesting and has many real-life impacts. We found how persuasive perceptions of boredom are and what an impact this can have on people.
'Perceptions can change but people may not take time to speak to those with "boring" jobs and hobbies and avoid them instead so they don't get a chance to prove people wrong and break these negative stereotypes.'
And low and behold, it turns out that the world's most boring person is a data entry worker who is religious, lives in a town, and has watching TV as their favourite hobby.
Data analysis, accounting, working in tax or insurance, cleaning and banking were also seen as top of the list of boring jobs, while people tended to think those who worked in the performing arts, sciences, as a journalist (phew!), health professional or a teacher were the most interesting.
Meanwhile, the hobbies seen as most boring included sleeping, watching TV, religion, watching animals and doing maths.
However, what the study is really getting at is that we should break our perceptions of what counts as boring as there are people being pre-judged and left out of the social interactions the rest of us get to enjoy as a result.
Dr Van Tilburg was keen to stress that people should not stereotype or dismiss others as boring, however, especially when many of them do jobs seen as dull which are very important to society.
Topics: Science
Joe Harker