Scrolling YouTube videos makes us more bored — and the antidote will surprise you

Cognitive psychologists have noted — in numerous studies over the past decade — that people engage with social media and other digital media to escape boredom. However, those same studies have also shown that using such media can amplify boredom in people rather than alleviate it.

That ironic result may be the product of constantly “switching” between different online content, constantly chasing new media to dispel current boredom.

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That is the finding of a new study in Journal of Experimental Psychologya scientific publication of the American Psychological Association. The study involved hundreds of online volunteers who reported feeling more bored after switching from one YouTube video to another over a 10-minute period.

“Boredom is unpleasant, and people can unintentionally make it worse,” write University of Toronto scholars Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht in the paper “Fast Forward to Boredom: How Changing Behaviors on Digital Media Make People More Bored,” published online this month.

Tam is a postdoctoral fellow at the University, while Inzlicht is a professor of psychology at the University, a professor at the Rotman School of Management and helps run the University. Lab for work and play.

To understand why digital media can have the opposite effect than desired, researchers asked participants to switch between YouTube videos and report how bored they felt before and after watching.

As they put it, numerous studies over the years have shown that boredom increases with the use of social media and other digital media. Boredom also increases with the use of smartphones more broadly. It is clear, Tam and Inzlicht write, that “Using digital media to alleviate boredom does not appear to be effective; not only that, it appears to make it worse.” Their mission was to find out why that is.

Tam and Inzlicht focus on the act of “digital conversion,” which they define as “the act of switching between or within media content.”

“Whether on TikTok, YouTube, or Netflix, people often skip segments, fast-forward through videos, or switch to other media platforms whenever the content starts to lose interest,” they observed. That behavior is “common in everyday life,” they noted, citing data showing that “on average, individuals switch between different mobile apps 101 times per day.”

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Tam and Inzlicht hypothesize that boredom initially drives switching between media clips, stemming from a desire to escape content that is not as stimulating as an individual expected.

They went on to propose a second hypothesis: It’s not the content of each video that adds to boredom, but the constant, incessant switching between new clips that “adds to boredom.”

Regardless of how interesting or boring some content is, “the act of digital transformation itself adds to boredom,” Tam and Inzlicht theorize.

Overall, the study results confirmed their hypothesis, they write, showing that “Switching between and within videos […] not only leads to less boredom but also increases boredom; it also reduces satisfaction, reduces attention, and reduces meaning.”

The researchers conducted seven separate studies to explore the two hypotheses. In each case, they recruited between 140 and 231 participants in different ways, including undergraduate students at the University of Toronto as well as participants recruited by a company called full recruiting paid members.

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In each study, participants were paid a small amount of money and told “that they had 10 minutes to be entertained by a 10-minute video (no-switch condition) or by a number of 5-minute videos (switch condition) and relax.” In that way, each study put participants in both conditions to see how their boredom responses changed with and without the ability to switch.

Participants in the switching group were asked about their expectations of future boredom before watching the videos. Overall, participants reported expecting to be less bored if they could switch between videos. (The purpose of the study was concealed; participants were asked additional questions about their emotional state to mask the study’s focus on boredom.)

The videos used in the experiment were selected by Tam and Inzlicht in a preliminary step to rate each clip as being “interesting” or “boring” in nature.

The full list of clips can be found in supplementary material for the study. Clips considered interesting include a montage of cute cat videoa movie about help a panda with an injured legAnd history of rome.

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The boring videos include some tutorials on how to code in CSS or Pythona five minute clip a clock counting down the secondsand instructions on how to solve algebraic equations.

The authors “intentionally controlled for variation in boredom ratings across these videos to ensure that any differences observed between experimental conditions were not caused by the video content,” they note.

Participants who “switched between videos and within a video” reported “feeling more bored, less satisfied, less engaged, and less meaningful than when they were restricted from switching.”

“Even when given the freedom to watch any video of their choice and personal preference on YouTube” — an option offered in one of the tests — “participants still felt more bored when they switched to digital than when they didn’t switch.”

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The authors conclude that the switch leads to disengagement, which increases boredom. “When participants switch digitally, they are unable to fully immerse themselves in the current content and make sense of it.”

Several caveats suggest that this issue warrants further study, Tam and Inzlicht write. One surprise was that the order in which participants were or were not allowed to switch between videos mattered. When they first watched a 10-minute video without switching, and then spent 10 minutes switching, they were more bored in the latter case.

However, when the order was reversed, participants appeared more bored when they were unable to switch throughout the 10-minute video after spending the first 10 minutes switching.

The authors reflect that it is possible that “participants felt more bored over time regardless of our manipulation.” However, it may also be necessary to maintain separate groups in future studies, with people either switching between videos or not switching between videos, but not both.

A deeper possibility, they write, is that being initially free to switch between videos, then restricted, creates stress in individuals, which they call “opportunity costs.”

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They say “Having only one video to watch without the option to fast forward can make viewers feel more bored without being able to move to another video.”

Their study “raised more questions than it answered,” they write. Further research should investigate questions such as “whether there is an optimal conversion rate.”

People’s predictions about how bored they would be before switching were also influenced by how the instructions were presented to them — as “constraints” or “choices” — which means future research needs to “explore people’s beliefs about digital switching,” Tam and Inzlicht write.

Still, the authors make a few key points. The study reinforces what previous research has shown, namely that “people are becoming increasingly bored,” they write. That “can lead to negative behaviors and mental health consequences.”

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They also suggest that allowing yourself to immerse yourself in a particular task or experience, such as watching an entire movie, can be a detoxifying method.

As Tam and Inzlicht say, “In this digital age, when watching videos is the primary source of entertainment, our research shows that enjoyment can come from immersing yourself in videos rather than swiping through them.”