This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Hey, are you bored right now? Of course you are, that’s why you’re on YouTube. Well, whatever you do, do NOT scroll past this video. Don’t skip ahead, don’t close the tab, don’t read social media while you listen to me talk. I’m saying this not just because it benefits me monetarily to have you put your precious eyeballs on me for the entire length of this video, but ALSO because new research suggests that if you think my video is boring and you want to hurry up and get to the point or go find something else more entertaining, you will actually end up even more bored than you are right now. Weird, right?
Don’t worry, I am right there with you: this study attacks me, personally, and I do not like it. But truly appreciating science means accepting that sometimes things are true even if you desperately do not want them to be true.
In fact, I wrote the script for this video while listening to a podcast about how and why our attention spans are shrinking and why multitasking is so bad. As a fun aside, at around the 12-minute mark the expert on that podcast, Dr. Gloria Mark, talks about the importance of setting natural break times if you want to switch tasks and that’s exactly when Indy started barking at something and I had to stop everything to go see what was wrong. It was the mail lady delivering a package. I had to get a new bike rack for the car because the old one fell apart. I mean, it was ten years old so I got a lot of use out of it, no big deal. Anyway, what was I talking about?
Oh yeah, attention spans and boredom and stuff.
Fast-Forward to Boredom: How Switching Behavior on Digital Media Makes People More Bored is the new study, published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. In the paper, researchers first asked a few hundred people how they felt about switching between videos or skipping within a video when they’re bored–these surveys were studies 1 and 2. They found that people do tend to switch around when they’re bored, thinking that it will make them, you know, less bored.
But the researchers then conducted a few tests that showed that that wasn’t necessarily true.
In Study 3, they asked 159 undergraduates to watch a single 10-minute video to relax and entertain themselves before completing an unrelated task. They were then given a selection of 5-minute videos they could switch between at their leisure, again just to entertain themselves. It’s worth noting that the researchers randomized the order in which they got these different video conditions. Students reported that regardless of which condition they got first, they felt less bored when watching the single 10-minute video compared to when they were able to switch between videos.
Fun fact: that study was originally going to have 189 subjects, but THIRTY people were excluded for failing an attention check. Imagine being so inattentive you don’t even qualify for a study on inattention. What absolute legends.
In Study 4, the researchers gathered a similar sized group of undergrads and this time they showed them the first ten minutes of a 50-minute documentary before doing an unrelated task. Then they were given another 50-minute documentary and told they could skip around as they pleased for ten minutes. Again, the students reported being more bored when they could skip around.
In those studies, the researchers were able to control and quality test the videos they showed the students. So for Study 5, they gave a new group of students the ability to go on YouTube and pick any video they want and watch it for ten minutes without interruption. After another unrelated task, the students were allowed to skip around YouTube all they wanted for ten minutes. And yep, once again, the students reported being more bored in the switching condition.
So there you have it: hopping from video to video or skimming through a single video will make you more bored.
Well, not necessarily. In yet ANOTHER study, the researchers expanded their test to an older and more diverse demographic (that is to say, not just undergraduates at the same university). This time, they found that the only time people reported being significantly less bored was when they were in the “no switching” condition first. If they were first allowed to skip around, they ended up being more bored in the later round when they couldn’t skip around.
This could mean one of two things: either older adults from more diverse backgrounds can be primed to prefer either skipping around or being fully absorbed in a task depending on which one is first, or they just run out of steam later in the testing day and get more bored by whatever comes at them second. The researchers don’t know which it is and so future studies will have to figure that out, ideally by comparing boredom between subjects as opposed to between the same subject at different points in the study.
I actually like this result. Yeah, it makes things messier, but that’s reality, isn’t it? So many psychological research that comes out extremely tidy and in line with expectations turns out to be cherry picked or outright fraudulent. Meanwhile, this study was pre-registered, so the researchers couldn’t go back and try different techniques to get the result they may have wanted.
But yeah, this study does suggest that for some people, their impulse to skip around to different media in order to cure their boredom is actually causing the opposite effect. But maybe not for everyone! In fact, as Dr. Mark points out in the podcast I did eventually pause to finish this script, everyone is different. If you sat me down and told me to work for four hours straight with absolutely no breaks, I would go batshit, get burnt out, and accomplish very little. If you make me work on my phone with all the push notifications on, I would go batshit, get distracted, and end up switching between TV Tropes articles all day.
There are even differences within individuals: there are different hours of the day when I tend to be more productive, which actually matches what Dr. Mark says in that show, which is mid morning and mid afternoon. And if I’m really focused on something, really absorbed in my work, I could write for hours without noticing the time go by at all.
Research shows that our collective attention spans have decreased in the past few decades, and that does seem to have significant negative impacts on our mental health. Every time you switch tasks, you’re putting more stress on your brain to switch gears. When we multitask, which includes working on two things at once or in quick succession, research shows that we pay a mental penalty that ends up making us less efficient overall.
So it may be worth taking the time to change up the way you work (and even the way you relax) to see if you find any benefits. Schedule some time in your day when there are no screens around! Put your phone down the next time you watch a movie! Or even, dare I say it, watch a YouTube video all the way to the end! You might get a pleasant surprise.
