Scrolling through videos on TikTok or YouTube to avert boredom may have a decidedly unintended consequence: It can make people feel more bored, according to the paradoxical findings of a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough conducted experiments to investigate the psychological effects of “digital switching” — the algorithmically enabled, quintessentially modern-day habit of flicking by and fast-forwarding through online videos during moments of downtime.
Katy Y.Y. Tam, a postdoctoral psychology researcher and boredom expert, launched the study after she noticed herself — and pretty much everyone else — swiping through videos on YouTube or fast-forwarding dramas on Netflix.
This behavior resonated with a theory she and colleagues had published in 2021, the “Boredom Feedback Model.” Boredom, they proposed, is rooted in attention shifts that occur when there’s a mismatch between how engaged people actually feel and how engaged they want to feel. The unpleasant emotion can develop when a situation lacks novelty or meaning, something that can arise when people start watching one online video but restlessly fast-forward or skip to the next one suggested by the algorithm.
“Since digital switching involves frequent attention shifts, I became curious how this behavior might influence our feelings of boredom,” Tam wrote in an email.
In experiments with more than 1,200 participants, many of them university students, Tam systematically showed that people switched to new videos when they were bored, believing the ability to switch would alleviate boredom but becoming more bored when they did.
In one experiment, participants watched a single video for 10 minutes and then were given seven shorter videos, with the ability to skip to the next. On average, participants skipped eight times — but reported feeling more bored, less satisfied and less engaged than when they watched a single video. A similar boredom and fulfillment gap arose when participants were asked to watch 10 minutes of a longer documentary with the control panel locked, then asked to watch 10 minutes with the ability to fast-forward or rewind. When they could skip around, they felt more bored.
Erin C. Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida who studies boredom and was not involved in the new research, said one of her thresholds when reading a new study is whether she would change her behavior based on the findings. In this case, she said, the answer is “a very chagrined yes.”
“My real guilty sin is switching madly between television series, watching half an episode, switching, bailing on it,” Westgate said. “I’m fairly persuaded that switching, when it comes to videos, it’s probably not a good idea if my goal is to have an enjoyable, interesting experience. Sitting and toughing it out is probably going to be the better choice.”
The results were far less clear when researchers tried to test whether the boredom effect of digital switching went beyond video and held up in a more diverse population.
They changed the medium from videos to articles about nature and animals and recruited a broader population of adults, instead of the university students who participated in most of the experiments. It turned out that when it came to articles, the effect was different than for videos: Boredom was similar between people who read one longer article compared with those able to skip between shorter ones.
The new results add to a growing body of scientific evidence that boredom is on the rise, despite — or perhaps because of — a world teeming with content that people can access at all times of day. People who are bored often turn to their phones, but then report being more bored, some studies have found. Scrolling on the social media platform X was linked to increases in boredom.
Michael Inzlicht, a psychology professor and co-author of the study, is old enough to remember the anticipation of waiting every Thursday to watch “Cheers” or “The Cosby Show.” He said he has been fascinated and puzzled by rising boredom in recent years. He attributes the phenomenon to a lack of immersion. He has seen it at home — his son plays video games and watches “The Office” simultaneously.
“When you’re immersed, you don’t feel bored. When your attention is spread, you’re almost by definition not satisfied,” Inzlicht said
Boredom is an uncomfortable emotion that serves a purpose, signaling that there is something more pleasurable to do, which can motivate people to explore their environment and stop investing time in an activity that has little to offer. But people seem increasingly intolerant of it, and Inzlicht has a counterintuitive tip for avoiding boredom: Lean into it. Sit with the discomfort of boredom for a bit before flitting to something else.
“If we’re so addicted to escaping boredom, so intolerant of boredom, it would be like a foraging animal going tree to tree, but never searching long enough to see if it bears fruit,” Inzlicht said. “Eventually, that animal will die.”