1.
Introduction
It is not at
all unusual to have the television or radio on while reading a newspaper,
eating breakfast, and now and then talking to somebody. We may also carry a
watch or pocket pager whose beeping signals remind us to move along to new
stimuli. We may also carry a cassette recorder (“ghetto blaster”) as we walk
down the street—adding noise for everyone else—or wear a “Walkman,” giving
continual entertainment in our own sonic cocoon (Klapp,
1986,
pp. 1–2).
This
quote, from early on in Orin Klapp’s (1986) treatise on boredom, captures only one end of the spectrum of
information processing he was concerned with—the
end at which it feels like trying to drink water from a firehose. The full
theory suggests that boredom will arise at both low and high levels of rate of
information change. As the ghetto blasters and pagers and Walkmans
bombard us with information, the task of making sense of that information
becomes challenging, if not impossible. At the other end of the scale, if we
have only a single, unchanging source of information (or multiple sources that,
in essence, convey the same information; Figure 1), there is so much built-in
redundancy that we find ourselves bored.
Figure 1.
Schematic Representation of the Role Played by Information in Boredom According
to Klapp (1986).
Note: When information is redundant—for example, a picture of a dog,
with an outline of the dog added, and the verbal label ‘dog’—boredom is more
likely, and when there is too much variety, noise, or randomness, boredom will
also arise. The challenge is essentially one of extracting meaning from the
world around us.
Clearly
embedded in a meaning-making framework (see Van Tilburg and Igou, 2012), the account of boredom Klapp
gives is one that suggests we ought to be able to find some kind of Goldilocks’
zone of information processing. Indeed, this may be something we strive for (Danckert and Elpidorou, 2023; Eastwood et al., 2012; Tam et
al., 2021a).
Klapp’s
model was not two-dimensional. He thought that some amount (or types) of
redundancy was good and that our best achievements arise from circumstances in
which we may first find information processing challenging (Figure 2).
Figure 2.
Broad Outline of the Two Dimensions along which Klapp
Saw Information Processing as Critical to Meaning-making.
Note: Information can be scaled along a meaning-entropy (randomness)
dimension or a redundancy-variety dimension. Example activities in each
quadrant represent the confluence of the scale ends (e.g., banality occurs when
both redundancy and entropy are high). Source: Adapted from Klapp
(1986,
p. 119).
More
specifically, redundancy could be considered both good and bad depending on the
meaning we extract from it. Rituals and customs, from family meals to religious
gatherings, provide structure and meaning to life, ultimately contributing to
our identity.[1] But when redundancy descends into the banal,
we see only the tedium of routines that lack meaning. Similarly, variety of
information is critical for guiding the way in which we explore our environs
and enables learning, adaptation, and more to occur. One might even suggest
that creativity depends on some variety of incoming information, or at the very
least, variety in the ways of perceiving and expressing what that information
might mean.[2] Nonetheless, when variety is untethered from
meaning it becomes mere noise, representing irrelevant information (Klapp spends considerable time talking of fads and trivia)
or becoming at best ambiguous and confusing.
Klapp’s treatise was a
sociological one, critiquing the way in which society writ large produces and consumes
information. With less available to consume we are better placed to make sense
of what is in front of us. According to Klapp, this
also opens us up to positive experiences, such as the capacity to experience
awe and wonder, and to be curious about our surroundings. On the other hand, an
explosion of constantly changing information leads to novelty becoming
meaningless, diminishing our capacity for such things as awe and wonder.[3]
2. Linking the Sociology
of Boredom to the Psychology of Boredom
Our aim here is not to
offer a critique of Klapp’s sociological framework.
Instead, we endeavor to bridge the gap between Klapp’s
framework and a psychological understanding of boredom within the individual.
We seek to explore how Klapp’s elucidation of the
social construction of information could shed light on the psychological
manifestations of boredom and boredom proneness.
In some sense, Klapp’s account
casts boredom as a defensive reaction to, or retreat from, noise at one end of
the spectrum and an appetitive search for information at the other. This
clearly pushes us to strive for a Goldilocks’ zone somewhere in the middle.
There may indeed be a natural oscillation cycle between ‘good redundancy’ and
‘variety’ (Figure 2) that captures the dynamics of two drives—the drive to
exploit known resources on the one hand, and to explore for better resources on
the other (Danckert, 2019). At the
end of the spectrum that Klapp labels banality, we
may feel the urge to explore our environs for something new to engage with—a
move towards variety. At the end of the spectrum he labels noise, we may
instead want to retreat into known circumstances that we can exploit for
optimal engagement (Agrawal et al., 2022). What Klapp
is claiming is that increased noise and redundancy—which he saw as a function
of his information age and can only be assumed to have increased in our own
time—makes it more challenging to achieve that natural oscillation between good
redundancy and variety, the balance between exploratory and exploitative drives
(Danckert, 2019).
There
is some prescience to Klapp’s claim that if our
communal crisis of meaning-making is predicated on information overload, the
solution will not lie in simply adding more information, something our current
age has clearly done (intentionally or otherwise). The analogy he adopts here
is with food. Simply consuming more leads to gluttony and discomfort. Boredom
is the outcome of the uncomfortable overconsumption of information.[4]
Time
also plays an important role here in Klapp’s
discussion of information and meaning-making. He makes
a distinction between subjective time and clock time. This is essentially about
the ‘slow horse’ (Klapp’s terminology) of
meaning-making. That is, when we do the more challenging work of making meaning
out of our environs, this evolves on a slower, subjective time scale. When
society ramps up the amount and pace of information processing this forces us
to process things more rapidly and more shallowly, bringing subjective
time more in-line with absolute clock time which, by undercutting the
meaning-making process, leads to a more pervasive sense of boredom across
society.
One
manifestation of this, for Klapp, is evident in
changing fads, the rapid movement of interest from one shiny object to the
next. Such swift transitions from one popular trend or fashion to another
suggests only shallow engagement, a failure to do the slower work of
meaning-making. Intriguingly, one recent computational model showed that
boredom can indeed influence changing preferences at a population level (Seiler
and Rumpel, 2023). These
authors first examined the changing trends for fashions on the cover of Cosmopolitan
magazine over a roughly 20-year period and showed that the predominant colors
did indeed show evidence of trends (i.e., short periods of time with consistent
colors modeled interspersed by longer periods in which colors of the cover
fashion models were more varied). The authors then created computational agents
that could be programmed to have varying levels of boredom. The agents then
‘chose’ what color to wear on a given day and when those agents then interacted
with one another, similar color choices were coded as more boring than distinct
color choices among the whole population of agents. This led to the evolution
of trends comparable to those seen on the real-world cover of Cosmo. The
level of boredom in the population could then be tuned up or down. When boredom
levels in the population were very low the color choices of agents rapidly
converged onto a single color—a kind of uniformity one might expect in a dystopian,
autocratic regime. When boredom levels were set to be extremely high, fashion
trends, such as they were, became highly unstable. For Klapp,
this might represent boredom at the extremes of information processing with
meaningless redundancy at one end and chaotic noise at the other (Figures 1 and
2).
Ultimately, for Klapp, these
challenges of meaning making amidst an abundance of ever-increasing
information, leads to a widespread meaning gap between the sheer volume of what
is available and our capacity (as both individuals and at a societal level) to
make sense of that information. This presages our current age, where mis- and
disinformation are rife (Pennycook and Rand, 2021).
Indeed, Klapp (1986)
explicitly warned against not only expanding amounts of information, but
fractionating the sources of that information:
the more
information is repeated and duplicated, the larger the scale of diffusion, the
greater the speed of processing, the more opinion leaders and gatekeepers
and networks, the more filtering
of messages, the more kinds of media through which information is passed,
the more decoding and encoding, and so on—the more degraded information might
be (p. 126, emphasis added).
Klapp’s ‘opinion leaders’ and ‘gatekeepers’
are today’s influencers.
Where Klapp was exploring the
ways in which the structure of society conspired to overproduce information and
the consequences of that proliferation, we are interested in how his account
might frame the individual’s experience of boredom. In one important sense, Klapp’s model casts boredom in information processing terms
such that we search for optimal levels of meaning—a kind of Goldilocks’ zone.
3.
Searching for the Goldilocks’ Zone
We have suggested
previously, that for the trait boredom prone, there are challenges of
information processing that can be cast in terms of both exploitation and
exploration (Danckert, 2019). For
the former, perhaps the most consistent cognitive finding in the literature
highlights that those high in trait boredom proneness struggle to focus and
sustain attention (Hunter and Eastwood, 2018; Malkovsky et al., 2012; Tam et
al., 2021a). That is, the trait boredom prone fail to
fully exploit their cognitive resources to meet the demands of the task at
hand. For the latter (exploratory failures), it has been suggested that those
high in trait boredom proneness fail to adopt goal pursuit modes that would
enable them to launch into action (Mugon et al., 2018). While Klapp’s theory was largely focused on
state boredom[5] within a broad societal context, these
theories suggest that a search for an optimal zone of engagement with the
world, characterizes both the state and the conundrum experienced by those high
in trait boredom—what John Eastwood calls the ‘desire bind’ of wanting to
engage with the world, but not wanting anything that is currently available
(Eastwood and Gorelik, 2019).
A broad implication of Klapp’s
theory is that humans strive to maintain some optimal level of cognitive
engagement—a kind of cognitive homeostasis (Danckert and
Elpidorou, 2023). By
analogy with physical homeostatic mechanisms, whereby deviation from a set
point of values (in reality, a range of values) signals the need for the
organism to adjust behaviour to promote survival,
boredom signals the need to alter behaviour to more
optimally deploy our skills and talents in-the-moment. But what evidence is
there that humans do indeed do this?
Westgate and Wilson (2018)
presented a series of experiments to test their model of boredom as a
combination of attentional engagement and meaning. In one such experiment, they
had participants perform a kind of ‘air traffic control’ task in which they
were to avoid having planes crash on a radar screen. Task difficulty was
titrated such that at very low levels of difficulty—when there were few planes
to monitor and it was facile to avoid
collisions—participants reported high levels of boredom. Interestingly, at very
high levels of difficulty—with many planes on screen and a high degree of
challenge to avoid collisions—people again reported experiencing high levels of
boredom (Figure 3). While not a direct test of information processing, these
data suggest that, at least in terms of task difficulty, boredom is felt most
strongly at the extremes, as Klapp would predict.
Similarly, we had participants play the children’s game
of rock, paper, scissors against a computer opponent that was rigged to let the
participant either win all the time or lose all the time. Participants rated
their perceived level of control and boredom in both conditions with results
showing that boredom was highest at the low and high levels of perceived
control (Struk et al., 2021; Figure
3).
Figure 3.
Data showing boredom at the extremes of tasks difficulty and perceived control.
Note: Data is adapted from Westgate and Wilson (2018;
left panel, adapted from their Figure 3, of Study 3, p. 703) and Struk et al. (2021; right panel adapted from
their Figure 4, p. 11). In both instances boredom is highest at the extremes of
either self-reported difficulty or perceived control over the task.
Both
of these studies
suggest that boredom is highest when we are outside of some optimal zone of
engagement, whether in terms of the perceived difficulty of the task, or our
sense of control over how the task progresses. What they do not explicitly
address is the hypothesis that humans strive to find that zone. There
are a number of ways to construe how humans engage in goal pursuit ranging from
satisficing (doing only what is necessary) to maximizing (making the best use
of a situation as possible; Kapteyn et al., 1979), to the
calculation of opportunity costs (i.e., changing tasks/goals when opportunity
costs are high; Kurzban et al., 2013; Struk et
al., 2020), and more (see Gollwitzer and Oettingen, 2012 for review). What is relevant here
is that each of these approaches to goal pursuit helps to keep us within an
optimal range of cognitive engagement. That is, different circumstances may
demand distinct goal approaches, but in all instances what we are striving for
is optimal deployment of cognitive resources. This hypothesis is yet to be
directly tested, but there are intriguing hints from other work that suggest it
is at least plausible.
Geana et al. (2016) had participants play a number guessing game that had three distinct
levels; in one condition numbers were generated from a uniform, random
distribution. In this instance, there was no way that people could guess the
upcoming number at better than chance levels. In another condition, the number
to be guessed was previewed for the participant, making the task facile (not
really a guessing task at all). The third condition drew numbers from a
Gaussian distribution. In this instance, participants could use error feedback
to learn the Gaussian and improve their guesses, which is precisely what they
did. What is relevant for our purposes is that it was this condition that had
the lowest ratings of boredom. Thus, when there was at least some information
to be learned from the task, participants were more engaged and less bored (Geana et al., 2016).
There is also good evidence to suggest that for many of
us, doing nothing is accompanied by deep feelings of dissatisfaction, so much
so that we may be willing to engage in self-harm. Wilson et al. (2014) showed this by having people sit in a room with nothing but their
thoughts for fifteen minutes. While many found this to be pleasant (or were at
least ambivalent about the experience) around one-third of the participants
reported it to be unpleasant. When these participants were given the
opportunity to self-administer electric shocks, many of them chose to do so
even though they had previously indicated they would pay money to actively
avoid experiencing the shocks (the participants had previewed the shocks just
prior to spending fifteen minutes in the empty room; see also Havermans et al., 2015; Nederkoorn et al., 2016; Struk et al., 2020 for similar results).
It is
plausible that one could engage in internal reverie while in an otherwise
barren environment.[6] Certainly, work from Van Tilburg et al. (2013) suggests that nostalgic reverie can act as an
antidote to boredom. But what the Wilson et al. (2014) data
suggests is that for many individuals, this is difficult to do, and that they
prefer to engage with the external world. Intriguingly, this experience is not
unique to humans, as Yawata et al. (2023) showed that mice placed in an
empty room sought aversive stimuli (a nose poke hole that delivered a puff of
air, a stimulus mice tend to find aversive). The rate of seeking aversive
stimuli was more frequent for mice in an empty room when compared with mice
housed in cages with interesting objects for them to engage with. It seems that
the desire to be engaged in optimal ways with the world may be universal.
Consistent with the need to engage (to act, as opposed to
doing nothing), work conducted during the pandemic showed that those high in
boredom proneness were also more likely to break the rules of social distancing
(Boylan et al., 2021; Drody et
al., 2022; Wolff et al., 2020). This
was not merely a question of impulse control. Boredom proneness was found to
impact rule-breaking behaviours even when trait level
self-control was accounted for (Boylan et al., 2021). Taken
together, these data highlight our desire to engage in optimal ways with the
world, a desire that is felt acutely when our current circumstances contain
little to no information to engage us cognitively (either because we are in a
room with nothing but our thoughts, or we are confined to our homes as a
function of pandemic restrictions).
Computational models of boredom cast it firmly in terms
of a drive to explore. An early model even suggested that boredom may function
to solve the so-called ‘dark room’ problem (Friston et al., 2012; Sun and Firestone, 2020). This problem is endemic to
predictive coding accounts of brain function. In these models, the brain
creates mental representations of the world that enable predictions of the
outcomes of intended actions. When those actions are deployed some form of predictive
error is represented and used to adjust future actions (Friston and Kiebel, 2009). More generally then, if the
organism is driven to reduce predictive errors, one ideal strategy would
be to crawl up into a ball in the corner of a dark room—a maximally predictive
environment. Clearly, we (and other animals with similar nervous systems) do
not do this. One thing preventing us from adopting this strategy may be boredom
(Gomez-Ramirez and Costa, 2017). As entropy falls below a certain
level, signaling a thoroughly predictable circumstance (Klapp’s
bad redundancy), boredom may signal our need to explore the environs for
something more variable to engage with (see also Agrawal et al., 2022).
Boredom has also been shown to be a great driver of
learning. When presented with maze-like learning tasks, a computational agent
guided by boredom performed better than one guided by curiosity (Yu et al., 2019). This is not to suggest that curiosity plays no role in learning, but
rather that, under some circumstances, boredom will drive exploration more
efficiently than will curiosity. Indeed, curiosity in a pure form may function
to root one to the spot. In another maze learning task, Burda
et al. (2018) presented an ever-changing stimulus on one
wall of a virtual maze. Their computational agent, driven by curiosity, stopped
to examine this constantly changing, but ultimately meaningless, stimulus. In Klapp’s terms, this is the equivalent of the noisy end of
the spectrum, where so many sources of information make it impossible to
extract meaning from the noise. Taken together, these computational accounts of
boredom (and to some extent, curiosity), suggest that we strive to find some
optimal zone of engagement with the world around us.
4. Boredom in the Age
of Information
If Klapp
was concerned in 1986 that the exponential influx of information would hinder
the process of meaning-making, one can only speculate on how that concern might
be magnified in our current environs. Buckminster Fuller popularized the notion
of the knowledge-doubling curve, the time span over which the total amount of
information doubles, purportedly taking around a hundred years until we reached
the middle of the 20th Century where the timespan reduces to 25
years. Recent suggestions put this doubling timeframe at anywhere between 12
months and 12 hours,[7] although Klapp (and
we) might want to make an important distinction here between knowledge and
information.
It is
not only the amount of information that has exponentially grown, but also the
rate at which that information is presented and processed. At the time of Klapp’s writing the rate of information processing in
computers was around 256,000 bits per second. Clearly, we now exceed that by
several orders of magnitude (average computers operating at 3.5 to 4.2 GHz).
Such an expansion in information processing rate makes the analogy of trying to
drink water from a firehose even more apt. And all this can be done through a
device we hold in our hands, carry with us everywhere and that has the capacity
to inundate us with notifications beyond the wildest capacities of the pocket
pagers, Walkmans, and ghetto blasters that had Klapp concerned in the quote that leads this piece.
Regardless
of how quickly the amount of available information doubles, Klapp’s
concern was that our information age would lead to an epidemic of boredom,
precisely because there was too much information and too little capacity for
making meaning. In short, as the amount of information increases, we require
more ‘channels’ on which to process that information. There is an inherent
bottleneck that we must then face given the limited perceptual, cognitive, and
neural resources we have (e.g., Sherman and Usrey, 2021). Ultimately, this forces us to select some channels to focus on and
others to ignore. We attempt to make meaning of information, to seek patterns,
and to build mental models of the world, all as a means of condensing the
information at hand into tractable, meaningful parcels. For Klapp,
the modern age (mid-1980’s for him) was making this harder and harder to
achieve as more and more information presented itself.[8]
But
what evidence is there that phenomenal changes in the amount, rate, and access
to information have led to an epidemic of boredom in our times? An epidemic may
be an overstatement, but it is certainly true that recent data from multiple
sources suggests that reports of boredom and rates of the trait disposition to
experience boredom are both rising (Gu et al., 2023; Weiss
et al., 2022; Weybright
et al., 2020).[9] Whether these rises are due to
information overload requires more research. But it is certainly plausible that
the challenge posed by information overload—a challenge in extracting signal
from noise to make sense of the world—is at least partly responsible.
There
is a great deal of work highlighting the role of boredom in both problematic
smartphone use and internet addiction (Cannito et
al., 2023; Dora et al., 2021; Elhai
et al., 2018; Lin et al., 2009; Wang et
al., 2020; Wolniewicz, et al.,
2020; Yang et al., 2020).
Typically, boredom and boredom proneness function as mediators between
problematic smartphone use and challenges to mental wellbeing (including higher
levels of anxiety and depression; e.g., Elhai et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2020). Rather than being the outcome of
information overload that Klapp initially cast it as,
it seems that boredom may drive us towards our devices as a solution, an
albeit ineffective one, to resolve the uncomfortable feeling of boredom. What
remains true from Klapp’s account is that our
relation to information represents a challenge of meaning-making. While our
phones and the internet are clearly exceptional sources of information, when we
turn to them out of boredom, we are passively letting the device occupy our
minds, as opposed to actively seeking meaning from what is in front of us. This
could be cast as an understandable reaction to the vast expanse of information.
Rather than doing the slow work of meaning-making (as Klapp
casts it) we can more easily indulge in the fast, surface consumption of
meaningless drivel.[10] The same can be said of problem gambling
(Kruger et al., 2020; Mercer and Eastwood, 2010). In both instances, the mind can be occupied with an ever-changing
stream of information (modern slot machines allow upwards of 20 lines of play,
with bells and whistles pushing continued play; Dixon et al., 2018),[11] while not necessarily extracting much
meaningful information. Such passive engagement with information can lead to a
vicious cycle: boredom pushes you to the passive intake of information, that
information fails to satisfy your need for meaning, and more boredom ensues (Danckert and Eastwood, 2020).
What
we have called ‘passive engagement’ Klapp (1986) called ‘busy boredom’:
When there is
too much chatter, attention becomes shallow, one does not listen with
whole-hearted interest but skims and scans restlessly,
looking for something significant: high mobility, heavy appointments, many
messages, many distractions, shallow engagement – busy boredom (p. 92,
emphasis added).
Klapp suggests a revealing analogy with pain-killers that remains relevant in our age. The increased
prescription and use of pain-killers do not represent
a cure, but rather the increased presence of pain. More information,
more easily at hand, with more constant opportunities for engagement (both good
and bad), does not represent the successful elimination of ennui, but rather an
increased incidence of boredom in our own information age. As Klapp (1986) suggests, boredom “arises when
pace gets faster, change lacks meaning, and movement lacks arrival” (p. 49).
Indeed, he suggests that one response to the barrage of information is to
attempt to have your own voice rise above the noise—what he calls ‘ego-screaming’.
It is easy to see how this is a prescient take on some of the vitriol present
on social media (March and Marrington, 2019). Ultimately, our thirst for information and entertainment,
particularly social media, then becomes a ‘placebo’ institution, a structure
that gives the illusion of having cured boredom without ever having addressed
the cause of the underlying issue (rather, it compounds it by providing yet
more information, more rapidly presented).
Clearly, a great deal more research is needed to fully
test Klapp’s notions of information and overload as
they relate to the experience of boredom and its outcomes. Carefully titrating
the amount of information in any given task is a key first start, but it will
be important to control for varying levels of meaning, challenge, and perceived
control in order to disambiguate the contribution of
each to the feeling of boredom. What kinds of circumstances lead one to
perceive information to be impenetrable as opposed to worth the challenge,
should delineate the upper bounds of information processing in the context of
boredom. Similarly, what differentiates tedious routines from meaningful
customs would isolate the lower bounds of boring information processing (Figure
2). It is also clearly worth drawing the bow in the opposite direction to what
we have done here—from individual experiences of boredom to the societal
structures that promote them. Clearly, we have exponentially increased the
amount, rate, and availability of information in our current age relative to the
1980’s. In revisiting Klapp’s theory, it will be
worth investigating the way individual experiences and responses to boredom
influence and are influenced by, the structures we engage with when consuming
information.
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