Study Finds Social Media Boredom Comes From User Control
In the race to keep users engaged, social media platforms often prioritize features like fast-forwarding, skipping, and easy switching between videos. However, recent research led by Dr. Katy Tam at the University of Toronto Scarborough suggests that these very features may inadvertently increase user boredom.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, involved over 1,200 participants across seven experiments. The findings challenge the common assumption that giving users control over their viewing experience—such as the ability to skip ahead or switch videos—naturally leads to greater satisfaction. Outside of platforms like YouTube, this can also apply to things like rapidly swapping between different people’s social media feeds.
Boredom is closely tied to attention, according to Dr. Tam. The research reveals that when users frequently switch between videos or skip parts of them, they are likely to experience a greater sense of disengagement. For instance, participants reported higher levels of boredom when they were able to skip through a video compared to when they watched it uninterrupted.
“We feel bored when there’s a gap between how engaged we are and how engaged we want to be,” Dr. Tam said. “(We) are looking for something more interesting.”
In experiments involving younger participants, the effects were more pronounced, suggesting that digital natives might be more susceptible to the pitfalls of endless skipping and switching. For users, this hints that resisting the urge to skip can lead to a much better social platform experience – including engaging with individual people, content pieces and communities in a less frivolous way.
For social app developers, these findings suggest a need to rethink how video content is presented and how user controls are designed. While it might seem intuitive to give users more control, this research indicates that reducing the ability to jump from content to content could actually increase user engagement.
