Scrolling YouTube videos is making us more bored – and the antidote will surprise you

Cognitive psychologists have noted — in numerous studies over the past decade — that individuals engage in social media, and other digital media, to escape boredom. However, the same studies reveal that consuming such media can amplify boredom in individuals rather than alleviate it. 

That ironic result may be a product of constantly “switching” between different content online, the relentless pursuit of the next piece of media to alleviate present boredom.

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That’s the finding of a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, a scholarly publication of the American Psychology Association. The study relates that hundreds of online volunteers reported feeling more bored after jumping from one YouTube video to another over a 10-minute period. 

“Feeling bored is unpleasant, and people may unknowingly make it worse,” write University of Toronto scholars Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht in their paper, “Fast-forward to boredom: How switching behavior on 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, a professor at the Rotman School of Management, and helps run the University’s Work and Play Lab.

In order to understand why digital media might have the opposite of its intended effect, the researchers recruited subjects to switch between videos on YouTube, and report before and after how bored they felt. 

As they frame their inquiry, numerous studies over many years have shown that boredom increases coincident with social media and other digital media use. Boredom also increases with smartphone usage, more broadly speaking. It’s clear, write Tam and Inzlicht, that, “Using digital media to alleviate boredom appears ineffective; not only that, it seems to make it worse.” Their quest is to find out why that might be the case. 

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

“Whether it is on TikTok, YouTube, or Netflix, people habitually skip some segments, fast-forward through videos, or turn to other media platforms whenever content starts to be less interesting,” they observe. That behavior is “prevalent in everyday life,” they note, citing data that show “on average, individuals switch between different mobile applications 101 times every day.”

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Tam and Inzlicht hypothesize that boredom initially prompts switching between media clips, out of a desire to escape content that is not as stimulating as an individual would hope. 

They go on to offer a second hypothesis: It’s not the content of individual videos that exacerbates boredom, but, rather, the constant, incessant switching between clips that “intensifies boredom.” 

Regardless of how interesting or boring any one piece of content may be, “the very act of digital switching itself exacerbates boredom,” hypothesize Tam and Inzlicht.

Overall, the study results confirmed their hypotheses, they wrote, showing that “Switching between videos and within video […] led not to less boredom but more boredom; it also reduced satisfaction, reduced attention, and lowered 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 University of Toronto undergraduate students as well as participants recruited by a company called Prolific that recruits panels for a fee. 

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

Participants who were in the switching group were asked about expectations for future boredom before watching the videos. In general, the participants indicated that they expected to be less bored by being able to switch between videos. (The intent of the study was disguised; participants were asked additional questions about their affective state in order to mask the study’s focus on boredom.)

The videos used in the experiments were selected by Tam and Inzlicht in a preliminary step that evaluated each clip for whether it was inherently “interesting” or “boring.” 

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

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Boring videos included several tutorials on how to code in CSS or Python, a five-minute clip of a clock counting down the seconds, and a tutorial on how to solve algebraic equations. 

The authors “deliberately controlled for boredom variability in these videos to make sure that any observed difference between experimental conditions was not generated by the video content,” they note.

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

“Even with the freedom to watch any videos of personal choice and interest on YouTube” — an option offered in one of the tests — “participants still felt more bored when they digitally switched than when they did not.”

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The authors conclude that switching is leading to disengagement, which heightens boredom. “When participants engaged in digital switching, they were unable to fully immerse themselves in the current content and make meaning of it.”

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

When the order was reversed, however, the participants demonstrated more boredom when they subsequently could not switch during the 10-minute video after spending the initial 10 minutes switching.

The authors reflect that it might be the case that “participants felt more bored over time regardless of our manipulations.” But, it might also be necessary to maintain separate groups in future studies who only either switch or don’t switch between videos, but not both.

A deeper possibility, they write, is that being initially free to switch between videos, and then constrained, produces a tension in individuals, what they call an “opportunity cost.”

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“Being restricted to watching only one video without the option to fast-forward might have intensified boredom in the subsequent no-switching condition,” as they put it.

Their study, “has raised more questions than it answers,” they write. Further studies should investigate questions such as “whether there exists an optimal level of switching.” 

Then, too, people’s own predictions about how bored they will feel, before switching, are affected, write Tam and Inzlicht, by the way the instructions are presented to them — as either “constraint” or “choice” — which means future research needs to “explore people’s lay beliefs about digital switching.”

Still, the authors assert a couple of takeaways. The study reinforces what prior research shows, namely, “People are getting increasingly bored these days,” they write. That is something that “could lead to downstream negative behavior and mental health consequences.”

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They also suggest that allowing oneself to be immersed in a particular task or experience, such as watching a movie all the way through, could be an antidote.

As Tam and Inzlicht put it, “In this digital age, where watching videos is a major source of entertainment, our research indicates that enjoyment likely comes from immersing oneself in the videos rather than swiping through them.”