Bored while scrolling through videos? Why it makes you even more bored – Deseret News

If you're bored and scroll through online videos, you may be making your problem worse. A study based on a series of experiments conducted by researchers at the University of Toronto found that watching clips of videos or fast-forwarding them – known as “digital switching” – increases boredom.

Actually watching videos you're interested in until the end is a different story, according to the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. In a series of seven experiments involving a total of 1,223 people, the researchers found that boredom leads to digital switching, which in turn leads to even more boredom.

The participants were a mix of people from the United States and students from the University of Toronto, and the boredom results were particularly evident among the young adults in the study.

“If people want to have more fun watching videos, they can try to focus on the content and minimize digital switching,” study leader Kay Tam, a postdoctoral fellow at the university, said in a press release. “Just like paying for a more immersive experience at the cinema, it's more fun to immerse yourself in online videos rather than swiping through them.”

As The Guardian reported, “boredom depends on attention, so switching between content or skipping back and forth is more tedious than watching a single video.”

According to the study, people go to considerable lengths to avoid boredom. According to the researchers, “As people spend more time on their smartphones, watching short videos on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, or other online media platforms is a popular pastime. Many people go to great lengths to avoid the restless or empty feelings often triggered by boredom. To avoid boredom, previous research has found that people will harm others for pleasure, shop impulsively, give themselves electric shocks, support extreme political orientations, or engage in counterproductive work behaviors.”

However, they reported that digital switching did not lead to increased engagement, but rather to “decreased satisfaction, decreased attention, and a reduced sense of meaning.” They wrote, “Even when participants had the freedom to watch videos of their personal choice and interest on YouTube, digital switching increased boredom.”

They concluded that “the fun of watching videos probably comes from immersing yourself in the videos rather than swiping through them.”

Getting to the bottom of boredom

Each of the experiments involved between 140 and over 200 participants.

In one of these cases, participants initially watched one video but then switched to another when they became bored. This contradicted the prediction of participants in an online survey who said they believed switching would relieve their boredom. The opposite was true.

In another experiment, students had to watch an entire 10-minute YouTube video without being given the option to leave it. They could not fast-forward it. They were then shown seven five-minute videos that they could freely skip through or skip over in a 10-minute period. “Participants reported feeling less bored when watching the single video and found the viewing experience more satisfying, exciting, and meaningful than when they switched between different videos,” the researchers reported.

They obtained the same result in another experiment. Participants had to watch a ten-minute video in its entirety, but were allowed to fast-forward or rewind during the 10-minute playback of a 50-minute video.

The study had some limitations. The researchers couldn't say whether short attention spans contributed to boredom or switching between digital media. Nor could their study address whether the findings, which were based on Canadian college students, would apply to other age groups or even to another country.

When they reviewed the results of 175 study participants, not all of whom were college-aged, they found that boredom levels were about the same regardless of whether participants were allowed to switch between five-minute videos or a single ten-minute video. And they found that the order in which participants watched the videos also affected boredom.

“We speculated that people of different ages have different habits when it comes to watching and switching between videos,” Tam told The Guardian. “How people consume videos and how this affects boredom may vary depending on age and digital media habits, but more research is needed to investigate this.”

But they also pointed to other studies that also found that people who are bored in queues or elevators, for example, turn to their smartphones, which in turn only increases boredom and reduces satisfaction. And they warned that the digital shift could be bad for mental health.

Tam said persistent boredom can increase the risk of “depressive symptoms, anxiety, sadistic aggression and risk-taking.”