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SALT LAKE CITY — Folks who scroll through online videos when they're bored may be making their problem worse. A study based on a series of experiments led by researchers at the University of Toronto found that watching snippets of videos or fast-forwarding through them — called "digital switching" — intensifies boredom.
Actually watching videos that interest you all the way through 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 turns leads to more boredom.
Participants were a mix of people from the United States and college students at the University of Toronto. And the findings on boredom were especially clear for the young adults in the study.
"If people want a more enjoyable experience when watching videos, they can try to stay focused on the content and minimize digital switching," study lead author Kay Tam, a postdoctoral researcher at the university, said in a news release. "Just like paying for a more immersive experience in a movie theater, more enjoyment comes from immersing oneself in online videos rather than swiping through them."
As The Guardian reported, "Boredom is linked to attention, so switching content or skipping forward and backward feels more tedious than watching one video."
People go to considerable lengths to avoid being bored, according to the study. Per the researchers, "Watching short videos on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook or other online media platforms is a common pastime as people spend more time on their smartphones. Many people will go to great lengths to avoid the restless or empty feelings that are often triggered by boredom. To avoid boredom, previous research has found people may harm others for pleasure, shop impulsively, give themselves electric shocks, endorse extreme political orientations or engage in counterproductive work behaviors."
But they reported that rather than creating engagement, digital switching led to "reduced satisfaction, reduced attention and lowered meaning." They wrote, "Even when participants had the freedom to watch videos of personal choice and interest on YouTube, digital switching still intensified boredom."
They concluded that "when watching videos, enjoyment likely comes from immersing oneself in the videos rather than swiping through them."
Drilling down on boredom
Each of the experiments involved between 140 and more than 200 participants.
In one, participants started watching a video, but when it was boring they moved on to another. That countered the prediction of participants in an online survey, who reported that they thought switching would ease their boredom. It did the opposite.
In another experiment, undergraduates had to watch an entire 10-minute YouTube video without an escape option. They couldn't fast-forward through it. After that, they were shown seven five-minute videos that they could freely move through or skip over a 10-minute period. "Participants reported feeling less bored when they watched the single video and found the viewing experience to be more satisfying, engaging and meaningful than when they switched through different videos," the researchers reported.
They found the same thing in another experiment, where participants had to watch a 10-minute video all the way through but were allowed to fast-forward or rewind during a 10-minute period while looking at a 50-minute video.
The study had some limitations. The researchers couldn't say whether short attention spans contributed to either boredom or digital switching. Nor could their study address whether the findings related to college-age students in Canada would be true in other age groups or even in a different country.
When they checked results of 175 study participants who were not all college age, they found the level of boredom was about the same whether participants were allowed to switch between five-minute videos or a single 10-minute video. And they noted that the order in which participants viewed videos also impacted boredom.
"We speculated that people of different ages may have different habits when it comes to watching videos and switching," Tam told The Guardian. "How people consume videos and how this affects boredom may vary based on age and digital media habits, but further research is needed to explore this."
But they also referenced other studies that also found people who are bored standing in line or in elevators, for instance, grab their smartphones, which in turn just increases the boredom and reduces satisfaction. And they warned that digital switching could be bad for mental health.
Tam said that being bored a lot could increase the risk of "depressive symptoms, anxiety, sadistic aggression and risk-taking."
