Boredom reflects the dynamic nature of consumer tastes and preferences. Understanding the role of boredom in clothing disposal is of particular importance given that consumers often dispose of clothes they feel bored with, leading to harmful environmental consequences. Despite its substantial influence on postacquisition behaviours, boredom has received insufficient attention in the disposal literature. In this paper, we explore the factors that lead to boredom and the effect of boredom on retention, recycling and discarding of clothing. We use a sequential mixed‐methods approach, consisting of a first qualitative phase that uses in‐depth interviews to generate hypotheses, followed by a second quantitative phase that tests the hypotheses using survey data. In two phases, we identify the oldness of clothing, decreased social fit and purchase of new clothing as drivers of boredom, which implies that the physical and aesthetic attributes of the clothing, social meaning ascribed to the clothing and situational factors collectively influence feelings of boredom towards owned clothing. As boredom intensifies, consumers are less inclined to keep the item and more inclined to recycle or discard it. Furthermore, we find that attachment and resource input (i.e., money, time and effort) moderate the effect of boredom on decisions regarding disposal methods. The results add to our understanding of emotion‐laden disposal by revealing the role of boredom in clothing disposal. Finally, our findings call for the collective efforts of consumers, retailers, campaigners and policymakers to break away from an increasingly extravagant and wasteful culture of clothing consumption.

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Banking institutions allow us to purchase homes for 20% of their value, codes of law give us the right to own those homes, and monetary systems enable the exchange of the value we have for the homes we want. Social institutions do not only grant us shelter but govern much of human life. It is no surprise then that academic disciplines such as economics (e.g., Schotter, 2008), sociology (e.g., Giddens, 1984), anthropology (e.g., Evans-Pritchard, 1952, and philosophy (e.g., Searle, 2010) are concerned with understanding the emergence of social institutions. 1 Although social psychologists have focused on the psychological attitudes, beliefs, and processes that maintain social institutions (e.g., Fiske, 1992;Jost, 2020;Sidanius & Pratto, 2004), and how those social institutions impact individual psychology and behavior (e.g., Tankard & Paluck, 2017;Vohs et al., 2006), social psychological factors that lead to the emergence of social institutions have received less attention. Here, we investigate what compels people to hesitate at the destruction of novel currency, potentially imbuing it with respect. Specifically, we examine whether people are more hesitant to destroy a novel bill when it is known by a greater number of people in one's social group.We create a fictional currency and vary its social knowledge across conditions. We reason that a currency gains respect (reflected in a higher reluctance to destroy it) when a person believes that more members of their group simply know about the currency. That is, as knowledge of a currency becomes more widespread, the odds of its future use increase. Put differently, because currencies can only be useful 2 when they are known to many in 1 Sociologists regard governments, families, currencies, universities, hospitals, corporations, and even human languages as social institutions (Miller, 2019). At its core, a social institution creates, governs, and sustains patterns of human co-existence and cooperation. A social institution is no ordinary object, it is a socially shared fiction (Harari, 2014) that affords humans small-and large-scale collective action.2 Critically, even though we are making a functionalist argument for the importance of social knowledge-money is useful to the extent it is known by many-we do not suggest that people necessarily know or perceive money that is known by many to be more useful. That is, people's behavior conforms to the proposed argument, without people's knowledge of the argument. Indeed, as our results suggest, widespread knowledge of money does not increase perceptions of its utility, or value.