By Athena Karsera
DO ACCOUNTANTS really deserve their reputation as the most boring people in the professional world or are they simply misunderstood?
According to US clinical psychologist Sally Edman, the answer is very simple: accountants are attracted to their tedious jobs because they are born dull.
Nicosia psychologist Vassilis Christodoulou tends to agree, but the accountants contacted by the Cyprus Mail said nothing could be further from the truth.
Speaking at American Psychological Association conference in Washington this week, Edman said her research indicated that accountants lacked “emotional intelligence”, which made them unable to interpret other peoples’ feelings.
She said psychologists had shown that accountants’ dullness caused them to have unfulfilling marriages and few friends, and added: “Accountants are much poorer at working out how other people are feeling…they also have very constant moods.”
She said this made them “emotionally unintelligent and unfortunately means that they tend to be less interesting than the rest of the population”.
Edman said her research had shown people chose professions they believed would suit them, “So we were not surprised to find that emotionally unintelligent people end up doing similar jobs.”
But Michael Zampelas of top accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers told the Cyprus Mail he was very surprised to hear about the report. “Because if you look around in business, in the government, in financial institutions, you will find accountants in (high-ranking) managerial positions. How can they say these people are born dull when they are clearly people on the move?”
Newly certified chartered accountant Andreas Markos agreed: “All through my studies, and we’re talking about a lot of years now, my classmates were just as outrageous as all the other students.
“Just because, like all professionals, we act efficiently at work, it doesn’t mean we’re dull people.”
Markos, who works as a freelancer, said he knew many accountants who spent their free time doing outlandish hobbies, adding: “I’m an accountant and I have plenty of friends.”
But psychologist Christodoulou said that Edman’s conclusions on accountants “usually apply”.
“It’s all a bit of a joke really. We say that accountants have no sense of humour, that they are boring. All they know about is numbers. This is what is wrong with our society today.”
According to Edman’s findings, economists, computer scientists and linguists also ranked extremely low on the scale of emotional intelligence, while musicians dancers, artists and actors scored the highest.
Closely following the artistic group in the emotional intelligence stakes are nurses, social workers, sociologists and politicians.
