Irritation, cooperation and human relationships

Irritation, defined here as the conscious experience of feeling annoyed, plays a significant role in human relationships of many kinds. Indeed, it seems that some of our most important relationships persist for decades in a state of chronic, everyday irritation. In this article, we examine this striking yet understudied phenomenon, drawing on cross-cultural evidence, including a set of interviews from China, Finland and the USA about irritation with respect to strangers, siblings and spouses/partners. As anthropologists would expect, the language of irritation and the practices surrounding it show significant – sometimes dramatic – variance across cultural-historical contexts. But the broad phenomenon was easily and immediately understood by our interviewees and has been observable in all our previous field sites. Given the pervasiveness of irritation in the human experience, we ask questions about the work that it does in different kinds of cooperative relationships. Although irritation can pose a threat to cooperative relationships, potentially causing them to break down, in some cases it has positive consequences as well, e.g., as when we display irritation in order to elicit desirable behaviour from others, or when it alerts us to potential problems in our relationships. Moreover, expressions of irritation may actually help to create intimacy and closeness in some circumstances.