What Makes for a Boring Person?

Why being in control matters to how people perceive us.

Posted May 11, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

Your friend Madison has been working at a Tech Giant for a few years now. Her work is dull, but Madison didn’t feel confident enough to ask her boss for a different role and just lets her job ennui persist. Eventually, she cracks and quits her job. Since then, she has drifted from one thing to another without any direction. Her friends tell her she lacks initiative and needs to step outside of her comfort zone.

Contrast that with your friend Jacob. He’d always wanted to become a doctor, but struggled to get the grades needed to make his dream become a reality. Never giving up, he enrolled in related training programs and worked for years as an intensive care nurse. Jacob eventually broke his way into medical school, worked hard, and finally fulfilled his dream of becoming a doctor.

Who is more boring? Madison or Jacob?

We recently asked this question and found that the key was agency. Demonstrating that you are in control of your life’s direction meant that you were not seen as boring. Behaving as though you had no choice over how your life went led to higher judgments of boringness. Madison was perceived as a bore!

We know that highly boredom -prone people experience less agency. They feel as though they are not fully in control of their lives. And we know that feelings of state boredom make us see less agency in the world around us.

What our latest work suggests is that a lack of agency in others makes them seem quite boring to us.

With my colleague John Eastwood, we wrote about what made a person boring in an earlier PT post . Being banal, overly ingratiating, or just too self-occupied all contributed to a perception of being boring.

Narcissism clearly plays a role here. There are two flavors of narcissists—the overt narcissist, the brash personality , confident they are God’s gift to everything, and the covert narcissist, who feels like the world has yet to recognize their amazing talents. Regardless of which flavor you’re confronted with, it is the narcissist’s failure to care about your life story that makes them seem boring to us.

But what about agency? The overt narcissist has a strong sense of agency. They are amazing, and the world is a better place for having them in it. We don’t see the overt narcissist as being boring. In fact, we may even be fascinated by them.

But the covert narcissist is disgruntled with life. They feel like wonderful things should happen to them simply because of how wonderful they are. What they don’t seem prepared to do is to go out and get what they think they deserve. They’re missing the ‘go-getter’ attitude and seem boring because of it.

This may be as simple as associating what we find boring with who we find boring. Lacking control over what we do—being forced to wait in line, having to complete mundane, pointless tasks just because the boss asks—is well characterized as both boring and lacking in agency. These things are not our fault—they are, by definition, out of our control. But when we are confronted with people who don’t seem able (or willing) to take control of their own lives, it is that lack of control in them that we find boring.

There’s clearly more to it than just agency. Wijnand van Tilburg and colleagues outlined a range of factors that people report being associated with the boringness of another . Narcissism was again front and center—those who showed a lack of interest in others were deemed boring—but a lack of humor and being a poor conversationalist also contributed.

They also found that people rated as lacking their own opinions were deemed boring. Failing to hold opinions on anything from the trivial (e.g., fashion) to the consequential (e.g., world politics ) reflects a failure to engage well with the world around you. It also looks a lot like Madison, our pitiful friend who lacks any agency in their own life.

Critical to an engaged life is the capacity to pursue goals that matter to us. When we see others struggling in that pursuit, we may cast a moral judgment (rightly or wrongly) that they themselves are boring.

And there are consequences to being seen as a boring person. We asked people how much money they would need to be paid to spend time with the people we introduced them to in our vignettes. Clearly, the more time you had to spend conversing with a stranger, the more money you wanted. But the effect was far stronger for the people deemed to be lacking in agency and therefore boring.

For every 10 dollars you demanded for spending time with Jacob (our high agency, low boringness person), you needed 16 dollars to spend the same amount of time with Madison (our hapless, low agency, high boringness character).

Maybe we’re just skewing our evaluations of people towards extraverts ? Perhaps the go-getters, high in agency, clearly in control of their own destinies, are just not boring?

But you don’t have to be an extravert to avoid the “boring” label.

What do you need to focus on to avoid being seen as boring?

Be a good listener. Engage with the life story of others.
Be open to new experiences. Trying new things is an indicator of someone who is curious about the world around them.
Be agentic. Demonstrate to others that you are capable of taking control of your own life goals. If what we are doing makes us feel like we lack agency, then feelings of boredom are not far away. If we allow that feeling to become our norm, then we run the risk that others will see us simply as a boring person.

Establishing our own sense of agency has twin benefits: We will find out what we can do to be more engaging, and others will see us that way too.

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James Danckert, Ph.D., is a Cognitive Neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo where he studies boredom, attention, mental models, and the consequences of stroke.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.