Article

Boredom is a state which everyone has probably experienced at one time or another, be it while waiting in a traffic jam, while completing tax forms, or while entering a vast amount of data. Notwithstanding how common boredom appears to be, this experience has only recently been subjected to sys-tematic psychological enquiry. As a result, very little is known about how this ordinary experience affects people’s thoughts, behaviors, and social environment. In the current article, we sought to fill this void by investigating how bore-dom relates to one particularly important social psychological variable: social identity. Specifically, we hypothesized that people more positively evaluate representations of their ingroups, relative to those of their outgroups, when they experience boredom. To understand why boredom triggers these processes, it is central to first consider the cognitions and motivations involved in the experience of boredom. Boredom In recent years, a number of researchers have suggested definitions and descriptions of boredom. Notable definitions have, for example, been offered by Mikulas and Vodanovich (1993), who stated that boredom involves “a state of rela-tively low arousal and dissatisfaction which is attributed to an inadequately stimulating environment ” (p. 3), and Barbalet (1999), who suggested that boredom “is a restless, irritable feeling that the subject’s current activity or situation holds no appeal, and that there is a need to get on with something interesting ” (p. 631) and that “boredom is anxiety about the absence of meaning in a person’s activities or circum-stances ” (p. 641; also see Fromm, 1973). Consistently, empirical studies have pointed out that boredom typically involves, or is triggered by, a lack of stimulation, variation, challenge, arousal, or meaning (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi