Boredom Pushes People Toward Unpleasant New Experiences
Understanding the Role of Boredom in Human Behavior
A recent study published in the journal Emotion has revealed that boredom can be a powerful motivator for people to seek out new experiences, even if those experiences are unpleasant. This research, conducted across three experiments, found that individuals who felt bored were more inclined to choose novel experiences, including those that evoked negative emotions like disgust. These findings challenge the traditional view of boredom as merely a nuisance and instead suggest that it may play a functional role by encouraging people to move away from repetitive or emotionally unstimulating situations.
For many years, psychology largely dismissed boredom as a trivial state with little impact on behavior. However, researchers have begun to reconsider its significance in recent years. Boredom is a common experience in daily life and has been linked to various behaviors, such as impulsivity, risk-taking, and disengagement in academic and work settings.
The research, led by Shane Bench of Utah State University Eastern and Heather Lench of Texas A&M University, explores what boredom actually motivates people to do. According to a functional perspective on emotions, feelings like anger, sadness, and joy serve specific purposes. They arise in response to particular situations and guide behavior in ways that help people achieve their goals. The researchers proposed that boredom fits into this framework by acting as a signal that one’s current activity is no longer satisfying or meaningful, prompting a shift toward something new — even if that “something new” isn’t necessarily enjoyable.
“We had two related interests,” explained Bench, an associate professor. “We wanted to consider anti-hedonistic behaviors (why people choose to experience something negative) and we were interested in exploring how and why people disengage from a goal and the role boredom, as a functional emotion, may play. We proposed that boredom signals disengagement from a current goal and motivates the pursuit of a novel experience. By ‘novel’ we do not necessarily mean completely new, just affectively different from the current state (e.g., if in a positive state, negative would be affectively different).”
“In this sense, boredom, while frequently considered a passing or meaningless state, could serve an important functional purpose – helping people move on from something that is no longer emotionally intense, to pursue something that will elicit a more intense emotion.”
Experiments on Boredom and Novelty Seeking
The researchers conducted three separate experiments to test their ideas. Each study used different methods to induce boredom and examine how people responded to it.
In the first experiment, 55 college students were shown a series of neutral images multiple times to induce boredom. Participants then rated how bored they felt. After this, they were given a choice: continue viewing similar neutral images or switch to a set of novel but unpleasant images, such as cockroaches or dirty dishes. More than half of the participants chose to view the negative images. Importantly, the more bored participants reported feeling, the more likely they were to make this choice.
“I was surprised that the negative image sets were chosen!” Bench told My healthy of life. “They were not pleasant, and based on models of hedonism, I thought that people would not choose them over more positive (or less negative) options. We chose this method because we thought it would be a strong test of our proposal of boredom as a signal and motivator to pursue change.”
This finding suggested that boredom did not simply make people passive. Instead, it appeared to motivate them to seek a change — even if that change brought on negative emotions like disgust. Trait boredom (a person’s general tendency to get bored easily) did not predict these choices, which indicates that the effect was tied to the immediate experience of boredom rather than a stable personality characteristic.
In the second study, the researchers sought to better understand what drives people’s choices when they are bored. This time, 150 participants were randomly assigned to either a high-boredom or low-boredom condition. Those in the high-boredom group repeatedly viewed neutral images for about 12 minutes. The low-boredom group either saw the images only briefly or not at all.
Participants then chose between two new sets of images: one that was unpleasant and one that was emotionally neutral. Unlike the first study, both options were new. Participants were also asked how much their decision was motivated by a desire for something novel.
Those in the high-boredom condition were more likely to pick the negative image set, and they also reported a stronger desire for novelty. A statistical analysis showed that this desire for novelty helped explain the link between boredom and choosing the unpleasant experience. In other words, boredom led to a craving for something new, and that craving influenced participants’ decisions.
The third experiment pushed the question even further. Could boredom that came from a positive experience still lead people to choose something negative?
In this study, 145 participants were divided into four groups. Each group repeatedly viewed either positive or negative images that were either highly arousing or only mildly arousing. All participants eventually reported feeling moderately bored, regardless of whether the images were pleasant or unpleasant.
Participants then chose between four new sets of images: one that was more positive, one more negative, one similar to what they had just seen, and one that was neutral. Over 70 percent of participants chose a set that differed from the one they had seen before. Notably, people who were bored by positive images often chose more negative ones, and those bored by negative images tended to switch to more positive ones.
The researchers also asked participants how strongly they felt a desire to experience something either positive or negative. Those bored by positive images were more likely to report a desire for negative experiences, and this desire predicted their choice to view more negative images. This pattern was reversed for those who were bored by negative images.
Taken together, the studies suggest that boredom prompts a search for emotional change. The target of that change does not have to be positive — it only needs to be different. Emotional contrast appears to be the key motivator.
“We found that boredom motivated people to seek affectively (emotionally) different experiences – even if the different experience was hedonically negative,” Bench said. “That is, when made bored by watching a series of repeating neutral images (things like: a leaf, a building, or a light bulb – images that people had rated as neutral), participants were more likely to choose an experience they expected to elicit negative emotion (i.e., they chose to view more images based on sample of images that included cockroaches, a destroyed building, and dirty dishes – things that were consistently rated as affectively negative).”
“This choice was driven by participants reported desire for novelty. In addition, participants made bored by viewing positive images (things like: people skydiving or appetizing desserts) were more likely to choose to view negative images (like: a snarling dog or people walking from a plane crash), and participants made bored by negative images were more likely to choose positive images. In all cases, this is evidence of boredom increasing a desire for something affectively (or emotionally) different from the current experience.”
Limitations and Future Research
While the findings are consistent across studies, the research does have some limitations. Most notably, the main outcome in all three experiments was a single decision made in a laboratory setting. It remains unclear how these choices would play out in real-world settings where people face more complex and meaningful options. For example, it is not clear whether someone who is bored would choose to start an argument, try something risky, or engage in a creative task.
The researchers also did not test whether these choices actually reduced boredom or improved participants’ mood. The findings show that people sought out new experiences when bored, but they do not demonstrate whether this helped them feel better or more fulfilled afterward.
In addition, the participants were mostly college students, which may limit how broadly the findings can be applied. Boredom is a common experience across ages and cultures, but the ways people cope with it may vary. Cultural preferences about emotional experiences, for example, could influence whether someone is more likely to seek out high-energy excitement or quiet introspection.
The authors suggest that future studies should look more closely at the consequences of boredom-driven choices. Do people feel better after seeking out a new emotional experience? Or are some of these choices maladaptive in the long run? Research in this area could also explore how individual differences — such as sensation-seeking or morbid curiosity — shape how people respond to boredom.
Another direction would be to examine boredom in more naturalistic settings, such as classrooms or workplaces. If boredom truly pushes people toward change, then understanding its effects could help educators, employers, and policymakers design environments that channel that motivation in productive ways.
“Often people wonder if approaching boredom as a functional emotion is intended to frame boredom as a ‘good’ thing,” Bench added. “Our theory does not view boredom as good or bad, but as an emotion that serves a specific function (signaling to disengage from a current task and motivating engagement of something different). This would be advantageous in certain circumstances and disadvantageous in others.”
The study, “Boredom as a Seeking State: Boredom Prompts the Pursuit of Novel (Even Negative) Experiences,” was authored by Shane W. Bench and Heather C. Lench.
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