Why Do We Get Annoyed? Science Has Irritatingly Few Answers.

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This story appears in the January 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Picture yourself at a crowded airport departure gate. Your flight is 20 minutes late, although the illuminated sign still says On Time.

The woman on your left is noisily eating something that smells awful. The overhead TV is tuned to a celebrity gossip show, a relentless stream of Bieber after Gwyneth after Miley, plus countless Kardashians. The man to your right is still braying into his cell phone, and the traveler next to him is preparing to kill time with … wait, is that a toenail clipper?

Unless you are saintly or unconscious, a few things in that description—or many things, or all the things—are likely to really bug you. We know an annoyance when we experience it. But from a scientific perspective, just what makes something annoying? Are some things universally annoying, while others are specific to an individual? And does research offer any advice for preventing life’s annoyances from making our heads explode?

The answers to those questions are: We don’t know, we don’t know, and no.

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Annoyance may well be the most widely experienced and least studied of all human emotions. On what do I base that assertion? About a decade ago, fellow journalist Flora Lichtman and I made that claim in a book called Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us—and in the intervening years, no one has challenged us.

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