Does boredom increase risk behaviors in real-world settings, and if so, might it contribute to failure to comply with public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic? In a large cross-national sample of 63,336 community respondents from 116 countries, we examined the prevalence of lockdown-related boredom during the initial outbreak of COVID-19, as well as its demographic and situational predictors. Boredom was higher in countries with more COVID-19 cases, more stringent lockdown policies, and lower GDPs, as well as among men and less educated/younger adults. Additionally, we examined whether “pandemic boredom” predicted longitudinal decreases in social distancing behavior (and vice versa; n = 8031). We found little evidence that changes in boredom predict individual public health behaviors (handwashing, staying home, self-quarantining, avoiding crowds) over time, or that such behaviors had any reliable longitudinal effects on boredom itself. In summary, we found little evidence that boredom affects pandemic health behaviors.

According to stereotype threat theory, the possibility of confirming a negative group stereotype can evoke feelings of threat, leading people to underperform in domains where they are stereotyped as lacking ability. This theory has immense theoretical and practical implications. However, many studies supporting it include small samples and varying operational definitions of “stereotype threat”. We address the first challenge by leveraging a network of psychology labs to recruit a large Black student sample (Nanticipated = 2700) from multiple US sites (Nanticipated = 27). We address the second challenge by identifying three threat-increasing and three threat-decreasing procedures that could plausibly affect performance and use an adaptive Bayesian design to determine which operationalization yields the strongest evidence for underperformance. This project has the potential to advance our knowledge of a scientifically and socially important topic: the conditions under which stereotype threat affects current Black students in the United States.

Why do people experience unpleasant, aversive emotions? Boredom is associated with a wide range of mental and physical health problems, including binge eating, substance use, anxiety, and depression. Nor does boredom feel good; many people are willing to shock themselves or even view upsetting images rather than be bored. Given such evidence, is it possible that boredom has adaptive value? We argue that it does; boredom provides an important evolutionary solution to minimizing prediction error by incentivizing learning. Reducing prediction error, it has been argued, is a core organizing principle underlying cognition; however, one way to reduce error is to isolate one’s self in extremely predictable environments (i.e., the “Dark Room Problem”). We argue that boredom evolved, at least in part, to prevent this. Specifically, boredom makes such a solution affectively undesirable, by aversively signaling a lack of successful attentional engagement in a valued goal-congruent activity. To reduce this aversive state, people are motivated to re-engage in meaningful activities and reallocate attentional resources. We review evidence from behavioral science and computational modeling supporting the role of boredom in maximizing learning and reducing prediction error. Furthermore, we suggest that these functions of boredom are not only present in modern humans, but have been conserved across species. We review evidence for boredom-like states in non-human animals and argue that animals likely experience boredom due to sharing many of the same psychological and physiological components of emotion as humans. For instance, animals in under-stimulated environments, such as cages or zoos, exhibit stereotyped behavior and other responses analogous to boredom in humans, including novelty seeking and play. In doing so, we address the adaptive value of boredom and its origins and prevalence in both human and non-human animals.

People discount both future outcomes that could happen and past outcomes that could have happened according to how far away they are in time. A common finding is that future outcomes are often preferred to past ones when the payoffs and temporal distance (how long ago / until they occur) are matched, referred to as temporal value asymmetry. In this paper, we examine the consistency of this effect by examining the effect of manipulating the magnitude and delays of past and future payoffs on participants' choices, and challenge the claim that differences in value are primarily due to differences in discounting rates for past and future events. We find reversals of the temporal value asymmetry when payoffs are low and when temporal distance is large, suggesting that people have different sensitivity to the magnitude of past and future payoffs. We show that these effects can be accommodated in an direct difference model of intertemporal choice but not in the most common discounting models (hyperboloid), suggesting that both temporal distance and payoff magnitude carry independent influences on the subjective value of past and future outcomes. Finally, we explore how these tendencies to represent past and future outcome values are related to one another and to individual differences in personality and psychological traits, showing how these measures cluster according to whether they measure processes related to past/future events, payoffs/delays, and whether they are behavioral/self-report measures.

Schools can be a place of both love and of cruelty. We examine one particular type of cruelty that occurs in the school context: sadism, that is, harming others for pleasure. Primarily, we propose and test whether boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic actions at school. In two well-powered studies (total N = 1,038) using both self- and peer-reports, we first document that sadistic behavior occurs at school, although at a low level. We further show that those students who are more often bored at school are more likely to engage in sadistic actions. Overall, the present work contributes to a better understanding of sadism in schools and points to boredom as one potential motivator. We discuss implications for research on sadism and boredom, in the school context and beyond.

Why do kids get bored? Does life get more interesting as we age? What boredom tells us and why changes across the lifespan, but its fundamental message remains the same: what you’re doing right now isn’t working. According to the MAC model, people become bored when they are unwilling or unable to focus on what they are doing. I explore theoretical predictions for how these deficits in meaning and attention manifest across the lifespan, particularly for children and adolescents, and the special challenges faced by older adults in the case of retirement and Alzheimer's disease (and other forms of dementia).

We all experience boredom, from being stuck in airport security lines to reading poorly written book chapters. But what is boredom, why do we experience it, and what happens when we do? We suggest a new take on this everyday emotional experience, as an important and potentially useful cue that we’re not cognitively engaged in meaningful experiences. According to the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model of boredom, people feel bored when they can’t successfully engage their attention in meaningful activities. Boredom can be painful, but it gives us important feedback about our lives, by signaling a lack of meaningful attentional engagement. In short, boredom tells us whether we want to and are able to focus on what we are doing or thinking, and steers us towards behaviors that ensure that we do. Across a broad range of situations, attention and meaning independently predict boredom, are not highly correlated, and do not interact. But more importantly, attention and meaning deficits result in different types of boredom with different downstream consequences for how people behave. For instance, being bored because what you’re doing lacks meaning feels different and has different consequences than being bored because you can’t pay attention, in part because they signal different problems. Likewise, boredom can result when something is too easy or too hard, because both make it hard to pay attention. All of these different causes of boredom matter, we argue, because they result in different types of boredom with different downstream consequences. Why we are bored shapes what we want to do next, and helps explain why bored people make often puzzling decisions, such as choosing to self-administer painful electric shocks or turning to political extremism. In short, like pain, boredom may be unpleasant but it plays an important role in alerting us when we either don’t want to (or are unable to) pay attention to what we’re doing, and motivating us to change our behavior to restore attention and meaning to our lives, for good or for ill.