Boredom Test: Why We Get Bored and What to Do About It

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

What is the nature of boredom and why do so many of us have such a strong predisposition to it? What makes us bored, and how does this affect our physical and emotional well-being? You will find answers to these and some other questions related to boredom in this material.

In 1990, when James Danckert was 18 years old, his older brother Paul had an accident, crashing his car into a tree. It was removed from the crumpled body with numerous fractures and bruises. Unfortunately, traumatic brain injury was also involved.

The rehabilitation period was very long and difficult. Before the accident, Paul was a drummer and was very fond of music. However, even after his broken wrist healed, he had absolutely no desire to pick up sticks and start playing. This activity no longer brought him pleasure.

Time after time Paul complained to his brother that he was insanely bored. And it was not about the attacks of post-traumatic depression. It's just that now the things that he previously loved with all his soul did not cause absolutely any emotions in him, except for deep disappointment.

Several years later, James began training as a clinical neuropsychologist. During his training, he examined about twenty people who received head injuries. Thinking about his brother, Dankert asked them if they felt bored. All twenty people who took part in the study responded positively.

This experience greatly helped Dunkert in his future career. He is currently a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada. This place is famous for the fact that it was here that scientists first began to engage in serious research on boredom.

Scientific community and boredom

It is believed that a universal and generally accepted interpretation of the concept of "boredom" has not yet been derived. Boredom is not just a form of depression or apathy. These words cannot be considered synonymous.

Scientists prefer to define the word "boredom" as follows.

Boredom is a special mental state in which people complain about the lack of even minimal motivation and interest in something.

As a rule, this condition has negative consequences for a person's mental health, and also noticeably affects his social life.

There has been a lot of research on boredom. For example, it turned out that it is she who is one of the reasons that provoke overeating, along with depression and increased anxiety.

Another study looked at the relationship between boredom and driving behavior. It turned out that people prone to boredom ride at a much higher speed than everyone else. They are also slower to respond to distractions and danger.

In addition, in 2003 it was organized among American teenagers, most of whom claimed that they were often bored. As it turned out later, such adolescents were more likely to start smoking and using drugs and alcohol at an early age. The research also touched upon education issues.

Student performance is directly related to whether they are bored or not. Boredom is a problem that requires a lot of attention.

Jennifer Vogel-Walcutt teen psychologist

Scientists are trying to understand how boredom affects our brains, how it affects mental health, and how it affects our self-control. “You need to study boredom thoroughly before making any concrete conclusions,” said Shane Bench, a psychologist who researches boredom at the University of Texas lab.

More and more people are interested in boredom. Geneticists, philosophers, psychologists and historians are beginning to actively unite in order to work together on its study. In May 2015, the University of Warsaw hosted an entire conference that discussed topics related to boredom, social psychology and sociology. In addition, a little later, in November, James Dunkert gathered about ten researchers from Canada and the United States for a thematic workshop.

History of the study of boredom

In 1885, the British scholar Francis Galton published a short report on how restless and inattentive the listeners who attended a scientific meeting behaved as a kind of beginning of the study of boredom.

Quite a long time has passed since then, and a relatively small number of people are interested in the topic of boredom. John Eastwood, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, is convinced that this is because boredom seems to everyone a rather trivial thing that should not be paid close attention.

That began to change when, in 1986, Norman Sundberg and Richard Farmer of the University of Oregon showed the world a way to measure boredom. They invented a special scale with which it was possible to determine the level of boredom without asking the subjects the question "Are you bored?"

Instead, it was necessary to confirm or refute the following statements: "Do you feel that time is passing too slowly?", "Do you feel that you are not using all your capabilities when you work?" and "Are you easily distracted?" They were formulated by Sandberg and Farmer based on surveys and interviews in which people talked about how they feel when they are bored. After the respondents gave their answers, each was given a score in points, which determined the degree of susceptibility to boredom.

The Sandberg and Farmer Boredom Scale was the starting point from which a new round of research began. It served as a prototype for other types of scales, and has also become incredibly useful in other applied sciences, helping to connect boredom with things like mental health and academic performance.

However, the proposed scale of boredom also had significant drawbacks. According to Eastwood, this indicator directly depends on a person's self-esteem and therefore is very subjective, which spoils the purity of the experiment. In addition, the scale only measures the level of susceptibility to boredom, not the intensity of that feeling. Inaccuracy of concepts and definitions still creates some confusion among scientists.

Work on improving the boredom scale is still ongoing. In 2013, Eastwood began developing a multidimensional state of boredom scale, which includes 29 statements about different feelings. Unlike the Sandberg and Farmer scale, the Eastwood scale measures the state of the respondent at the current moment in time. With its help, you can establish how a person feels right now.

However, before measuring the level of boredom, the researchers had to make sure that the participants in the experiment were actually experiencing it. And this is a completely different task.

The most boring video in the world

In psychology, for many years, one of the most effective ways to create a certain mood in a person is to watch thematic videos. There are special videos that stimulate in a person the emergence of such emotions as joy, anger, sadness, sympathy. This is why Colleen Merrifield, while writing her dissertation, decided to create a video that was so boring that it would bring people to tears.

In the video, the following happens: two men are in a completely white room with no windows. Without uttering a single word, they take clothes from a huge pile and hang them on ropes - jackets, shirts, sweaters, socks. The seconds are ticking: 15, 20, 45, 60. Men hang clothes. Eighty seconds. One of the men takes a clothespin. One hundred seconds. The men continue to hang their clothes. Two hundred seconds. Three hundred seconds. And again, no change - men hang clothes. The video is looped in such a way that nothing else happens. Its total duration is 5.5 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, the people to whom Merrifield showed the video found it unimaginably boring. Then she decided to try to study how boredom affects the ability to focus and focus.

Merrifield asked participants to complete a classic attention-focusing task: observing spots of light that appeared and disappeared on a monitor. All this deliberately lasted an incredibly long time. The result exceeded expectations: this task turned out to be many times more boring than the most boring video. More than half of the subjects were unable to cope with it.

This was not a surprise. In many past studies, scientists have also asked subjects to perform monotonous activities instead of watching videos. In order for a person to start to get bored, he was asked, for example, to fill out the same forms, to unscrew or tighten the nuts. Comparing the results of different studies was quite problematic because there was no uniform standardized approach to methods of inducing boredom. It was impossible to find out whose results were correct and whose were not.

In 2014, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, published an attempt to begin the standardization process. They identified three groups of activities that are more likely to cause boredom in people:

• repetitive physical tasks;
• simple mental tasks;
• viewing and listening to special video and audio recordings.

The researchers used the Eastwood Multidimensional Boredom Scale to determine how much each of the tasks performed made the subjects bored and whether it provoked any other emotion in them. There were six extremely dull tasks in total. The most boring thing was to endlessly click with the mouse, turning the icon on the screen half a turn clockwise. After that, it was decided to no longer show special videos in order to make people bored, and instead use ordinary behavioral tasks.

Boredom and self-control

Many scientists associate the onset of boredom with a lack of self-control. The better you are at taking responsibility for your actions, the less you are prone to spontaneous boredom. This is why researchers often associate a predisposition to boredom and addiction to bad habits such as gambling, alcoholism, smoking and overeating.

Does this mean that boredom and lack of self-control are interrelated things? Scientists have not yet undertaken to answer this question. Using people who have had a head injury as an example, Dankert suggests that their self-control system has malfunctioned. That is why they begin to behave overly impulsively and often acquire a lot of bad habits. The scientist managed to notice this, observing his brother.

However, for several years, Dankert's brother actively struggled with self-control problems and practically stopped complaining of boredom, simultaneously reviving his love for music. Therefore, researchers have every reason to believe that boredom and self-control may depend on each other, but there is still insufficient evidence and evidence.

Boring plans for the future

Despite some conceptual confusion and lack of standardization, boredom researchers believe the foundation has already been laid. For example, finding the very definition of boredom is considered an important part of the learning process. Different researchers identify different types of boredom. German scientists counted as many as five and found that the inclination to any type depends on the personality characteristics of a person.

Scientists are also sure that there is a group of people who will work tirelessly, just not to get bored. Sometimes such people are willing to choose extremely strange and even unpleasant activities in order to avoid boredom. This hypothesis is based on research that has shown a relationship between risk appetite and predisposition to boredom.

The first study was this: participants were asked to sit on a chair in a completely empty room and do nothing for 15 minutes. Some participants were willing to even receive small electric shocks, so as not to be alone with their thoughts. Several more advanced experiments were carried out with the same room. In one, the participants had unlimited access to sweets, but in order to get them, they had to endure an electric shock. When participants became bored, they preferred to experience pain rather than sitting in a chair and doing nothing.

A team of researchers led by psychologist Reinhard Peckrun from the University of Munich in Germany monitored the behavior of 424 students for a year. They reviewed their grades, documented exam scores, and measured their boredom. The team found some cyclical pattern whereby all students experienced periods when they were bored. And it was then that a significant decrease in the internal motivation of students and their performance indicators was noticed. Such periods occurred throughout the year and did not depend on the gender and age of the student and his interest in subjects. Scientists have suggested that students need something to help them overcome boredom.

Sae Schatz, director of a company that develops teaching aids and educational tools for the US Department of Defense, cites an interesting example of a computer system that taught physics to students as evidence. The system was programmed in such a way that it was supposed to insult anyone who answered the wrong question, and sarcastically praise those who gave the right answer. This unusual approach to teaching stimulated students to achieve better results, constantly kept their brains in good shape and did not let them get bored.

Looking ahead, scientists are determined to further explore boredom. They want to better understand how this phenomenon relates to other mental states of a person. It is also planned to expand the field of research and conduct experiments with the elderly, as well as with people of different ethnic groups and nationalities. Given the huge impact of boredom on education, scientists want to work on improving the boredom measurement scales and adapting them for children.

There is also an urgent need for as many scientists as possible to understand the importance of studying the subject of boredom. Dankert is sure that in this case there will be much more chances to quickly systematize the knowledge already gained and start new discoveries.