Lessons Learned from Intentionally Dull Studies: Methodological Recommendations for Experiments on Boredom

Experimental work on boredom is becoming increasingly important in psychological science and promises to be a valuable tool for understanding this important but historically trivialized experience. With the emergence of this experimental work, a major challenge emerges that limits new contributions: experimental manipulations of boredom are particularly likely to cause problems related to participants' motivation and performance, leading to differential engagement and even dropout across experimental conditions. This undermines the internal validity that is otherwise the hallmark of the experimental method. We conducted four experiments to determine which combination of experimental features (e.g., lab vs. online; reward size) produces a statistically effective and methodologically sound boredom induction. Our results suggest that researchers should rely more on laboratory tasks that are not overly boring (even if the goal is to manipulate boredom) and where rewards are not only sufficiently large but also vary with participants’ adherence to study procedures.