Browsing videos on TikTok or YouTube can be a hit-and-miss affair, with gems lurking amid mediocre efforts. But researchers have found that switching to another video, or skipping forwards and backwards in the same one, actually makes people more bored.
Dr Katy Tam at the University of Toronto Scarborough, the lead author of the research, said boredom was closely linked to attention.
“We feel bored when there’s a gap between how engaged we are and how engaged we want to be,” she said. “When people keep switching through videos, they become less engaged with the videos and they are looking for something more interesting. This can lead to increased feelings of boredom.”
The results appear to chime with other studies: as the team notes, previous research has suggested that while boredom relief is a driver for people to use social media or smartphones, the use of such technology appears to make the feeling worse.
Writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Tam and colleagues report how they carried out seven experiments involving a total of more than 1,200 participants.
The first, involving 140 participants, revealed that people tended to switch between videos more when they rated the content more boring, while the second – an online survey involving 231 participants – suggested people thought having the option to skip through a video or switch to another would make viewing a video less boring.
However, the team’s subsequent experiments suggest this is not the case.
Data from a group of 166 undergraduates suggests participants felt more bored when allowed to skip about within a video than when they were not able to, while results from 159 undergraduates revealed they reported higher levels or boredom when given a collection of five-minute videos they could switch between, compared with a single 10-minute video.
The researchers found similar results when the latter experiment was repeated with 174 undergraduates who were allowed to pick their own videos from YouTube – although the size of the effect was smaller.
However, when they looked at the results from 175 participants of a broader age range, they found no difference in reported boredom when the participants were given five-minute videos they could switch between, or a single 10-minute video to watch. What’s more, unlike in the earlier experiments, the order in which participants undertook the viewing tasks had an influence on their levels of reported boredom.
Tam said one explanation for the differences could be demographics, noting the later experiments involved participants with a broader age range and an older mean age than the earlier experiments.
“We speculated that people of different ages may have different habits when it comes to watching videos and switching,” she said. “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.”
Ultimately, said Tam, it could be worth taking your time before hitting the fast-forward or skip buttons, and find ways to stay focused while watching videos.
“Our research shows that while people fast-forward or skip videos to avoid boredom, this behaviour can actually make them feel more bored,” she said. “Just as we pay for an immersive experience in a movie theatre, enjoyment often comes from immersing ourselves in videos rather than swiping through them.”
