No, this isn’t a list of people who are annoying. It is a blog post about the act of annoying other people. Kind of.
I get to perform experiments with undergraduate student participants. A typical question might ask participants to rate their attitudes (liking/disliking) for something. I have recently begun including an item, near the end of the experiment, which asks the participant:
What do you think was the hypothesis (expected result) of this study? In other words, what do you expect we were examining, and what results would you predict? If you are unsure, that is completely acceptable.
The idea here is that I don’t want to make this experiment so obvious that participants are able to guess the hypothesis and respond accordingly (in which case they’d seem to confirm the hypothesis even if the effect isn’t really happening). As another possibility, some participants might guess the hypothesis and purposefully try to contradict it. Jerks.
Some answers to the ‘guess the hypothesis’ question have been good ones.
Most participants say “unsure”, another “I’m actually not sure”, another “I really don’t know”. The latter 2 are to be lauded for their honesty. They weren’t just unsure — they were actually not sure and really didn’t know. They weren’t just kidding.
(“Just teasing Jeremy, I actually totally knew your hypothesis! I wasn’t actually “unsure” after all. LOL.”)
Another participant answered: “How to annoy people”. CORRECT!
Which makes me think of a great and terrible film: How to Irritate People.
Another answer: “Cats are better than dogs”. I had to exclude this participant because he or she clearly has a distorted view of the world.
This ‘toon originated in a chat with Anneke. But we are both indebted to Isaac Newton for his research. (You can find it here. No, of course Newton isn’t there. Newton is dead. I’m sorry.)
So, there you have it. One participant discovered my secret plan to discover how to annoy people. As a middle child, I have been able to experience being a younger brother and having a younger brother, so I was already basically an expert. (Just teasing, brothers!)
On a serious note, Social Psychology (noun. The social/behavioural science of how to annoy people) has faced a lot of criticism.
Some say that it is a pseudoscience. After all, how could anyone measure something as indefinable or intangible as “how to annoy people” ? The natural sciences often deal with objectively measurable concepts, but daren’t delve into examinations of how to annoy people.
Many question the feasibility of a social science whose rather obtuse definition, from Gordon Allport, is:
the scientific study of what annoys people, as well as how to annoy people. In other words, how to aggravate, irritate, or bother other people. So far, all that I know is that redundancy, repetitiveness, and pleonasms are annoying and/or irritating to people. That is all that I know so far. Then again, it is only 1954, so I am sure by 2013 social psychologists will better understand and comprehend how to annoy people. Perhaps people, even Canadian people, will be blogging about how to annoy people. By 2013, we will have unlocked the key and know how to annoy people, but I will be dead by then, which is itself a tad annoying.
Yes, I’m aware that my reference to blogging is an anachronism, but that has never stopped me before! Annoyed by anachronisms, you say? Well SMARTPHONE LOLCATZ YOUTUBE to you!
Many others question Social Psychology on ethical grounds. After all, it is a social science founded with the express purpose of annoying people. This of course is unethical because other social scientists get jealous that they do not get to study fun topics such as “How to annoy people” and “How to annoy animals” and “How to annoy cute little houseplants that are just so cute that you felt you had to grant it personhood without regard for the ethical complexity of granting anything personhood.”
That may unethical. But so is axe murdering, and that has not stopped me before. I mean… nothing.
In conclusion, the best ways to annoy people are to leave them without a feeling of closure and to
jeremyhasablog 