Perhaps you have the reflex, to kill time, to take out your phone to scroll (or unwind, in good French) videos on social networks. And in this case, probably switch (to switch : switch, even if “flickering” would be prettier). That is to say, you don’t even watch the videos until the end, skimming 24 seconds of Aya Nakamura, ricocheting to Donald Trump’s latest outburst then grabbing a few glimpses of a ministerial slip of the tongue and an influencer who blows her nose.
A piece of advice: raise your foot, or rather your thumb, you’re hurting yourself! A Canadian team has just shown it. Researchers first confirmed that boredom pushes people to scroll. But that’s not all: the more we get bored, the more we watch short videos without necessarily going to the end. This is called digital switching.
However, on average, people who are asked to watch a video without interruption for ten minutes are less bored than those who can skip through seven videos, the researchers explain. Not only do the fools feel even more idle than before, but they also don’t remember much of what they saw since they weren’t involved in it. Likewise, on YouTube, we are generally less bored when we are forced to watch a video continuously than when we can take breaks, speed up or go back to better peck at, we believe, the most juicy content. And this, even when you have composed your own menu with videos of your choice! It’s like at the cinema: we will be more absorbed by a film watched continuously than by snippets of various works presented in turn and without chronology. With your phone, when you’re bored, you don’t let your attention jump like a kid: you secure it. Otherwise, the cure will be worse than the disease.
Source
Katy Y. Y. Tam et Michael Inzlicht, « Fast-forward to boredom. How switching behavior on digital media makes people more bored », Journal of Experimental Psychology General, vol. 153, 2024/10.
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