Scrolling through YouTube videos bores us even more – and the antidote will surprise you

Cognitive psychologists have found in numerous studies over the past decade that people use social media and other digital media to avoid boredom. However, the same studies show that consuming such media may increase boredom in people rather than alleviate it.

This ironic result may be a consequence of constantly “switching” between different online content and the relentless hunt for the next medium to dispel current boredom.

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This is the finding of a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, a scientific publication of the American Psychology Association. The study says that hundreds of online volunteers reported feeling more bored after jumping from one YouTube video to the next within 10 minutes.

“Boredom is unpleasant, and people may unconsciously make it worse,” write University of Toronto researchers Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht in their paper “Fast-forward to boredom: How changing behavior in digital media makes 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 and a professor at the Rotman School of Management and helps run the university's Work and Play Lab.

To understand why digital media may have the opposite effect to its intended effect, researchers recruited subjects who switched back and forth between videos on YouTube and reported how bored they felt before and after use.

As they note in their research, numerous studies over many years have shown that boredom increases with the use of social media and other digital media. And, more generally, boredom also increases with the use of smartphones. It is clear, write Tam and Inzlicht, that “the use of digital media appears ineffective in alleviating boredom; not only that, it appears to make it worse.” Their goal is to find out why this might be so.

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

“Whether on TikTok, YouTube or Netflix, people habitually skip sections, fast-forward videos or switch to other media platforms when the content becomes less interesting,” they note. This behavior is “widespread in everyday life,” they note, citing data showing that “people switch between different mobile applications an average of 101 times a day.”

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Tam and Inzlicht hypothesize that boredom initially causes people to switch between media clips because they want to avoid content that is not as stimulating as hoped.

And they put forward a second hypothesis: it is not the content of the individual videos that causes boredom, but rather the constant, incessant switching between clips that “increases boredom”.

Regardless of how interesting or boring a particular content may be, “the very act of switching digitally exacerbates boredom,” Tam and Inzlicht suspect.

Overall, the study’s results confirmed their hypotheses, they wrote, showing that “switching between videos and within videos […] did not lead to less boredom, but to more boredom; it also reduced satisfaction, reduced attention, and reduced meaning.”

The researchers conducted seven separate studies to test the two hypotheses. In each study, they recruited between 140 and 231 participants in different ways, including students from the University of Toronto as well as participants recruited by a company called Prolific, which recruits panels for a fee.

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In each study, participants were given a small amount of money and told “that they had 10 minutes to entertain themselves and relax with a 10-minute video (no switching) or with some 5-minute videos (switching condition).” In this way, participants in each study were exposed to both conditions to see how their response to boredom varied with and without the opportunity to switch.

Participants in the switching group were asked about their expectations of future boredom before watching the videos. In general, participants reported that they expected less boredom if they could switch between videos. (The purpose of the study was concealed; participants were asked additional questions about their emotional state to conceal the study's focus on boredom.)

The videos used in the experiments were selected by Tam and Inzlicht in a first step in which each clip was rated according to whether it was inherently “interesting” or “boring”.

A full list of clips can be found in the study's supplementary material. Clips deemed interesting include a montage of cute cat videos, a film about helping a raccoon with an injured paw, and a history of Rome.

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The boring videos included several tutorials on coding in CSS or Python, a five-minute clip of a clock counting down the seconds, and a tutorial on solving algebraic equations.

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

They found that participants who “switched between videos and within a video” reported that “they felt more bored, less satisfied, less engaged, and less meaningful than when they could not switch.”

“Even when given the freedom to watch videos of their choice and interest on YouTube” – an option offered in one of the tests – “participants still found themselves more bored when they switched to digital than when they did not.”

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The authors conclude that switching leads to disinterest, which in turn increases boredom. “When participants switched digitally, they were unable to fully immerse themselves in and understand the current content.”

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

However, when the order was reversed, participants were more bored because they were no longer able to switch channels after 10 minutes of switching during the 10-minute video.

The authors suggest that it may be that “participants became more bored over time regardless of our manipulations.” But it may also be necessary to maintain separate groups in future studies that only switch between videos or not, but not both.

A deeper possibility, they write, is that the initial freedom to switch between videos and the later restriction creates a tension in individuals that they call “opportunity cost.”

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“Being restricted to watching only one video without the ability to fast-forward may have increased boredom in the subsequent non-switching condition,” they say.

Their study “raised more questions than it answered,” they write. Further studies should examine questions such as “whether there is an optimal level of conversion.”

People's predictions of how bored they will feel before switching are also influenced by the way the instructions are presented to them – either as a “constraint” or as a “choice,” according to Tam and Inzlicht. Future research therefore needs to “address people's lay beliefs about digital switching.”

Nevertheless, the authors draw some conclusions. The study reinforces what previous research has shown, namely: “People are increasingly bored these days,” they write. This is something that “could lead to negative behavior and psychological consequences.”

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They also suggest that an antidote might be to fully engage in a particular task or experience, such as watching a movie to the end.

As Tam and Inzlicht put it: “In the digital age, where watching videos is a major source of entertainment, our research suggests that enjoyment is more likely to come from immersing yourself in the videos rather than just swiping through them.”