Boring people really DO drone on: Speakers who go past their time more likely to be uninteresting

Boring people really go on talking for longer, researchers have found.

While most people who have had the misfortune to sit through a terrible best man’s speech or a neverending conference session may have suspected in, London researchers now have research to back it up.

One researchers decided he had had enough of boring conferences, analysing 50 speeches to try and find a pattern.

Robert Ewers of Imperial College London said in a letter to Nature he decided to investigate the issues to answer the question ‘Dull talks at conferences can feel interminable. Or could it be that they really do go on for longer?’

He decided to investigated the theory at a meeting where speakers were given 12-minute slots to talk. 

‘I sat in on 50 talks for which I recorded the start and end time. I decided whether the talk was boring after 4 minutes, long before it became apparent whether the speaker would run overtime,’ he said.

‘The 34 interesting talks lasted, on average, a punctual 11 minutes and 42 seconds.

‘The 16 boring ones dragged on for 13 minutes and 12 seconds (thereby wasting a statistically significant 1.5 min’

Ewers concluded that for every 70 seconds that a speaker droned on, the odds that their talk had been boring doubled. 

He also had some advice for those having to give talks.  

‘To avoid banality, speakers should introduce their objectives early on and focus on pertinent information. 

‘They should avoid trite explanations, repetition, getting bogged down by irrelevant minutiae and passing off common knowledge as fresh insight.’