The Relation of Boredom and Sadistic Aggression
I don't usually like Johnny Harris, I find him kinda annoying, but I do watch his stuff sometimes. This morning he released a video on boredom, and that lead me down a long road of research to learn this:
Boredom consistently predicts sadistic behavior. Across nine studies with over 7,600 participants total, the researchers found strong evidence that boredom is linked to sadism, in some manner work to harm others for pleasure. People who are chronically prone to boredom in everyday life showed higher levels of sadistic tendencies.
The relationship appears across multiple real-world contexts. The boredom-sadism link wasn't limited to laboratory settings. It manifested in various important societal contexts including online trolling, sadistic behavior in military settings, parents' treatment of children during childcare, and sadistic fantasies.
Boredom can be experimentally manipulated to increase sadistic behavior. When researchers deliberately induced boredom in participants, it led to increased sadistic actions like killing worms and destroying other participants' monetary rewards.
Available alternatives matter significantly. When people had multiple behavioral options available, boredom only motivated sadistic behavior among those already high in dispositional sadism. However, when no alternatives were present, boredom increased sadistic behavior even among people normally low in sadistic tendencies.
The mechanism involves seeking excitement and novelty. The researchers found that boredom's effects on sadism were mediated by people's desire for excitement and novelty-seeking - essentially, sadistic behavior served as a way to escape the aversive state of boredom.
The research gives psychological substance to what generations have observed:
Peeping people engaged in meaningful, stimulating activities isn't just good for productivity - it may be crucial for preventing antisocial behavior. This suggests the folk wisdom has merit - idleness or lack of meaningful activity can indeed lead people toward "devilish" behavior, not necessarily because they're inherently cruel, but because boredom creates such an uncomfortable state that people will seek relief through whatever means are available. The researchers found that boredom creates an "aversive motivational state" where people seek "any form of stimulation or excitement" to escape that unpleasant feeling. When constructive alternatives aren't available, even causing harm to others can serve as a way to generate the novelty and arousal needed to alleviate boredom. This research provides compelling scientific evidence for the age-old saying "idle hands are the devil's workshop." The paper essentially demonstrates that when people are bored - cognitively understimulated and lacking meaningful engagement - they become more prone to harmful, sadistic behavior toward others.
The boredom-sadism connection helps explain several troubling aspects of our current digital landscape:
Online harassment and trolling become clearer through this lens. When people are scrolling mindlessly through social feeds, experiencing the chronic understimulation that characterizes modern boredom, they're primed for sadistic behavior. The research showed that boredom specifically predicts online trolling - suddenly those vicious comment sections make more sense. People aren't just "naturally mean online" - they're bored and seeking stimulation through causing harm to others.
Cancel culture and pile-ons could partly stem from this dynamic. When algorithms fail to provide sufficient novelty and excitement, participating in collective harassment becomes an easy way to generate the arousal needed to escape boredom.
Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Candy Crush are essentially boredom-management systems, but they're creating a vicious cycle:
They provide just enough stimulation to temporarily alleviate boredom
But they don't provide the deep meaning or sustained attention that would prevent boredom
This creates chronic low-level understimulation - exactly the state the research identifies as dangerous
When the apps fail to deliver sufficient novelty, users become primed for more destructive forms of stimulation-seeking
These apps are designed like casino games - intermittent, unpredictable rewards that keep people engaged but never truly satisfied. This creates what the researchers would recognize as a perfect storm: chronic attention deficits (from fragmented, shallow engagement) combined with meaning deficits (from consuming rather than creating meaningful content).
The research suggests we're potentially creating a society-wide condition where millions of people exist in a state of chronic boredom masked by digital stimulation. When that stimulation fails or becomes insufficient, the pathway to sadistic behavior becomes more likely.
This might explain why we're seeing increases in cyberbullying, online harassment, and even real-world violence that seems to stem from digital interactions. The "devil's workshop" isn't just idle hands anymore - it's minds trapped in cycles of shallow digital engagement that never quite satisfy our need for genuine stimulation and meaning.