225. Am I Boring You?

Researchers are trying to figure out who gets bored - and why - and what it means for ourselves and the economy. But maybe there's an upside to boredom?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, just because something is free, like a podcast, it doesn't mean it's worthless, does it? That's what we're trying to find out, and we need your help. Has Freakonomics Radio ever accomplished anything worthwhile for you or anyone you know? Maybe someone took an idea they heard here and helped solve a problem or started a company? Maybe you used some of the information or stories we've told to make some improvement in your life, small or large? If so, send us an email and tell us about it. The address is [email protected]. We're looking to tell some of your stories in a future episode. So thanks for writing and thanks for listening.

• 3:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  About 100 years ago, around the time of the First World War, there was a growing concern in Britain about working conditions in factories, mines, and elsewhere. Here's how the historian Anthony Wall described working conditions during the Victorian era. "For industrial workers, the working day meant early starts, long hours, and often physically demanding labor in conditions that would have challenged even the strongest constitutions. To start work at 6:00 AM, perhaps after walking through sleet or rain, and to continue at it all day in overheated, drafty, or ill-ventilated workrooms meant for many, a slow process, a physical decline, or a life lived continuously on the brink of exhaustion."

• 3:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  This exhaustion was worrisome for the workers, of course, but also for their employers and for Britain, because exhaustion presumably meant lower productivity. And nobody wanted that.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  So Britain forms the Industrial Fatigue Research Board.

• 4:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is so British.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. It's soon after the war. And even in its name, you can see the focus is really on fatigue. They're trying to figure out the limitations of assembly line production workers. Kind of early on, they think fatigue is the main limitation.

• 4:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Amanda Markey. We'll meet her more formally in a bit. The Industrial Fatigue Research Board, she tells us, hired a psychologist named Stanley Wyatt.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  And for him, he actually starts by looking at how differences in temperature affect productivity.

• 4:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wyatt didn't find much there in the temperature idea. So he started talking with assembly line workers about the repetitive tasks they did all day.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  And he finds that it's really not fatigue that's the limiting factor of production. It's boredom.

• 4:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Up to that point, Markey says, the causes and consequences of boredom hadn't really been studied. What effect it might have, for instance, on the economy.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  The word boredom actually doesn't even start occurring in the English language until the 18th century. It's pretty late on the scene.

• 5:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're kidding. Really?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  No. Yeah. And once it comes into the language, it quickly takes off. And it comes with the rise of industrialization and also with the rise of leisure time. So there's kind of like a burst of research at the very beginning on assembly line workers, looking at boredom. But then funding dries up, and unsurprisingly, so does the research.

• 5:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Amanda Markey is so interested in boredom that she wrote her PhD dissertation in economics on the topic.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  There were still a lot of gaps in the literature.

• 5:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So on this episode of Freakonomics Radio... Boredom.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Boredom?

• 5:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Boredom. The concept of boredom. Is boredom somehow an economic concept?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Boredom is a way to signal that you're mismanaging scarce resources. And of course, scarcity is just at the foundation of economics.

• 6:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is there perhaps an upside to boredom?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Boredom is useful because you don't want an organism who just does the same thing over and over again without learning anything.

• 6:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if I asked you to just sit there for a while and do nothing but think, will you get bored? And what will you do to alleviate that boredom?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  An astounding percentage of people hate sitting there thinking so much that they'll start shocking themselves.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 6:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Amanda Markey did not mean to get bit by the boredom bug.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  This is kind of embarrassing as a boredom researcher, but I'm hardly ever bored.

• 7:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  While studying behavioral economics at Carnegie Mellon University, Markey was looking around for a research topic.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  And our professor, George Lohnstein, was listing a series of topics he felt like hadn't gotten enough attention.

• 7:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Things like privacy, or the way some people collect expertise about something like wine, the way other people collect physical goods, and also boredom.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  And the more I looked into it, the more I found it was really fertile ground.

• 7:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  These days, Amanda Markey makes her living as an algebra teacher in New York City, which, depending on how you feel about algebra, makes her an automatic boredom expert. In any case, the fact is that psychologists have yet to really land on a clear, universally-accepted definition of boredom and what causes it. Is it a lack of novelty? The absence of meaningful engagement? Or maybe it's a somewhat useful dormant state? But here's what experts do know about boredom.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  OK, so there are two types of boredom. There's trait boredom and state boredom.

• 8:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  State boredom is being bored in the moment. As in, this movie is boring. This party is boring. This podcast is boring? Please, God, no. And then there's trait boredom.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Trait boredom is the question of, are you the type of person who's likely to experience boredom?

• 8:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is, are you someone who's routinely bored, no matter what you're doing? Again, Markey points out that boredom research isn't all that far along, but earlier studies have at least shown that boredom is associated with a lot of negative things.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Boredom is associated with depression. It's associated with loneliness, gambling, drinking, dropping out of school.

• 8:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, saying that boredom is associated with those things doesn't tell us if boredom causes them. It could be that loneliness is boring, that depression is boring, that you get bored once you drop out of school. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that people really can't stand to be bored. Hi, Dan Gilbert.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Dan Gilbert here. Stephen.

• 9:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dan Gilbert is a Harvard psychology professor. He mentioned some research he had conducted on the disengaged mind.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  If you're interested in boredom,

• 9:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  you might be interested in an article that Tim Wilson and I published in Science last year.

• 9:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's what Gilbert and Wilson wanted to know. When people find themselves with nothing to do but think, have to entertain themselves with their own thoughts, is that a pleasant experience? To find out, the researchers recruited 55 undergrads, male and female. They put them in an unadorned room, one at a time, and exposed them to a variety of positive and negative stimuli.

• 9:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  A recording of guitar music, for instance, a color photograph of a cockroach, and a mild, but still quite painful, electric shock.

• 10:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  The participants were then told to imagine they'd been given $5. Then they were asked whether they'd pay some of that money to not receive the shock again. The vast majority of them, 42 of the 55 students, said they would pay to not be shocked. And then, Gilbert says, each of those 42 students was left alone by themselves in this unadorned room.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  And you tell them their job is just to think.

• 10:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  But if they wanted to, at any point, they could shock themselves again.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  And it turns out that an astounding percentage of people hate sitting there thinking so much that they'll start shocking themselves.

• 10:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  One participant shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes.

• 10:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now granted, this was a very small and narrow experiment. But let's assume we take its findings at face value, that having nothing to do but think is so unpleasant that some people would rather inflict pain on themselves to relieve their-- well, this is another assumption, but let's say it-- to relieve their boredom. If that's the case, I know. If, if, if. But remember, it's still early days in boredom research. If that is the case, Amanda Markey wondered, why have humans evolved with this peculiar emotion?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Most emotions in the world tell you, direct your attention to something, even if it's something negative, right? Even like disgust says, this is really important, direct your attention. Boredom is really one of the few, and maybe even the only emotions that says, this isn't a good use of your time, direct your attention to something else, like get out of this situation.

• 11:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Markey and her professor, George Lowenstein, wondered if economics might have some explanation for why we get bored. They came up with what Lowenstein calls the scarce capacity theory of boredom.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  So you have mental resources, they're scarce, and they're really important and valuable. And boredom develops as the signal that mental resources are not being used wisely. They're not being used on valuable pursuits. And a lot of this was based on-- I think you spoke with Angela Duckworth?

• 12:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  We did speak with Angela Duckworth. She is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on education. Duckworth used to be, like Amanda Markey is now, a schoolteacher.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  I taught math, yeah.

• 12:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Duckworth and some colleagues created a model for thinking about emotions that might help explain boredom.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  If you ask a simple question, why we have emotions, the answer seems to be that evolution gave us emotions for survival. So fear is useful, anxiety is useful, and even boredom is useful, because you don't want an organism who just does the same thing over and over again without learning anything. It would be good to equip that organism with an emotion, an urge, to move on when they don't think that they're learning anything new.

• 12:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  The argument is that we're constantly doing a sort of cost benefit analysis of how to spend our mental energy. Consider a student in the classroom bored.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  My guess about boredom is that the thought that kind of goes through a kid's head, whether it be conscious or not, is the idea that I am not learning anything right now that I care about. And so I think, actually, kids are, in a way, like little economists who are weighing the costs and benefits of what they're doing. And when the calculus seems to favor not paying attention to what the teacher's saying, or not doing their homework, then that's what they do. I think, in a way, they're very rational. The premise of that theory is that boredom is a way to signal that you're mismanaging scarce resources.

• 13:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Amanda Markey again.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  And of course, scarcity is just the foundation of economics. They actually also say that how you judge the value of what you're doing is not only based on what you're doing, but it's also based on opportunity cost.

• 13:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  As in, there are other, more interesting, more valuable things I could be doing with my time. Markey and her colleagues wanted to test this scarce capacity theory. First, they needed a reliable way to induce boredom in the laboratory.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  So our first challenge was just having something to give lab participants in order to make them bored.

• 14:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  In earlier boredom studies, Markey says, researchers came up with makeshift ways to bore the participants. You'd have to write the same two letters of the alphabet over and over, or watch a video of people doing their laundry.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  And none had really been validated to ensure that they actually do induce boredom, and also, really importantly, don't induce other emotions, because you don't want a task that induces both boredom and anger.

• 14:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Markey and her fellow researchers came up with a series of boring-seeming tasks and began testing them to find the boringest of the boring.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Which was fun, because everyone has an opinion on the most boring situation. And one guy in the lab, he said the worst job he ever had was working at a bank and having to match signatures. And he said it was just the worst job, because they always matched. So we did a signature matching task, based off of his experience.

• 15:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have to say, when I tried your signature matching task, I got so bored that I stopped. Marky and her team even produced their own boring video.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  I've been asked to tell you about my day yesterday.

• 15:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  They hired an actor to play the part of an office worker who sells cardstock.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  I guess it's important to let you know that I work for a company that orders office supplies for other companies and communicate.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  It was a pretty low-budget production. He talks about his day and what he had for breakfast and how cardstock prices are controlled by the weather.

• 15:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, really? See, I'm super interested in that somehow. Cardstock prices are controlled by the weather because of tree growth or something? Or pulp-ing or manufacturer?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  I don't think we did any homework whatsoever to look at the validity. And then we thought maybe the video would be too interesting because you'd have this person to look at. So we also did an audio version to see if radio was particularly boring.

• 16:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  And which induced more boredom? The video of the cardstock script or the audio of the cardstock script?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Slightly more for the video, but not significantly different.

• 16:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  But audio is slightly less boring than video, you're saying?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  I am saying that.

• 16:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is good news for those of us who make audio. You realize the ammunition you're giving us here. You realize how I can exploit this and blow it out all proportion.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Do you want me to repeat it?

• 16:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sure, with an exclamation point, absolutely. After each task, the participants were asked questions to judge their level of boredom. For instance, did it seem like time was passing slower than usual? And did you feel bored? Under this system, one task emerged as the most boring of all.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  OK, so the most boring task that we came up with is turning pegs or turning cogs.

• 16:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  This task was borrowed from an old experiment that asked lab subjects to turn little wooden pegs. Marky and her colleagues modified the task for a computer.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  So specifically, what we had participants do is there were eight circles on a screen. And every time they would click, it would rotate at a quarter turn. So they would rotate the first peg, and then they'd move to the second peg. And once they finished the eight pegs, they'd start all over again.

• 17:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Participants turn the pegs, the screen resets, repeat.

• 17:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Repeat.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  So it has this kind of Sisyphean element.

• 17:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, they had a quantifiably reliable way to make people bored. Markey and Lowenstein could test the scarce-capacity theory of boredom. If boredom is a signal that a task isn't worth doing, what if they made the task a little bit more worthwhile? One obvious way was to use money.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  We paid people a piece rate in terms of how many pegs they're turning.

• 17:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, the stakes, we should say, were tiny. The researchers randomly split the participants in half. One group would earn just a half cent per peg turned, and the other got two and a half cents. The most anyone could earn was $8. But people had to turn the pegs for several hours. They click, they turn, the screen resets, they click and turn some more.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  And when you pay people more, sure enough, their level of boredom goes down. So that was one manipulation that we figured was very straightforward, but surprisingly hadn't been done before.

• 18:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Another intervention was to make the task more challenging.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  So we made the pegs a lot smaller, and they kind of darted around, so you had to chase them.

• 18:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, you had me at dart around it. Now it sounds like a game instead of a task somehow.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we tried to gamify it a little bit, so that effectively reduces boredom.

• 18:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, the researchers wanted to look at people's boredom levels when they thought they were being watched.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  We told them that they were going to be monitored. So this was a lie. They weren't monitored in any way.

• 18:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  You guys are mean.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. We told them, "You're going to be monitored by different judges. They're going to watch your performance for about 10 seconds, and then they're going to give you a rating." So we found that reduced boredom. But we also did a manipulation check, because we wanted to see, like, did you really think that someone was watching you? So we asked them at the very end of the study, and we said, "You know, you got these ratings. Do you think there was a real person observing you?" And the vast majority of our sample said, "No." Yet, we still see the reduction in boredom.

• 19:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow, that's...

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really interesting. To address this, we thought, "Well, maybe we'll just give them objective feedback." So we made a little chart in the corner, and every five seconds, it would update on real time. And this did reflect how many pegs you were turning. And you kind of saw this line creeping up, or it would flatten out if you stopped. And we found that was really effective at reducing boredom as well.

• 19:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  But as Marky and her colleagues ran more experiments, there were things they expected to find, things that should prove the scarce-capacity theory, that they did not find. In one manipulation, for instance, they thought they could make the peg-turning task less boring by telling participants that there was an altruistic angle.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I really wanted this to work, and I tried it numerous times, and I just couldn't get it to work. So at first, we just told people, like, "We want to study assembly-line workers, and your work will really help us better understand and make conditions better for assembly-line workers." No effect, and that was all just verbal. Then we said, "We want to help children with ADHD." And we had a picture of a child on the screen and said, "Your work on this task is just going to really help us better understand ADHD and attention." And we were really hoping that these altruistic interventions of helping other people would make a difference. And you know what? It just didn't.

• 20:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Then the researchers tried to add some opportunity cost to this boring task. Subjects sitting at the computer were instructed to open their email program in the second tab. And then the researchers sent the subjects an email.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  And we were hoping what this would do is it would make the task more boring, because you kind of have this other thing tugging at your mind. And we didn't find that it made it more boring.

• 21:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which left them puzzled. According to the scarce-capacity theory, adding something more interesting to do should make the task even less engaging. On the other hand, adding the altruism should make the task more engaging or less boring. This all makes George Lowenstein wonder if his scarce-capacity theory really does help explain boredom. It might, he told us. It's just that he and his colleagues haven't been able to prove it yet. By the way, if you want to try all the boring tasks that Marky and her colleagues tested, you can find the link at Freakonomics.com. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, the relationship between happiness, sex, and boredom, whether retirement leads to boredom.

• 21:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  But first, we hear what you, Freakonomics Radio listeners, have to say about boredom.

• 21:55Speaker 06

  Hello, Freakonomics Radio. My name is Margaret. I am 20 years old and I am from Boston, Massachusetts.

• 22:01Speaker 07

  My name is Ted Schmitz. I'm 27. I'm a valet in Arizona.

• 22:05Speaker 06

  I really feel like I never really have time to be bored.

• 22:08Speaker 07

  But in place of that, I've seen a huge increase in anxiety or depression.

• 22:16Speaker 06

  So what actually happens is if I find a time when I'm bored, I have this panic attack. I don't know what to do with myself.

• 22:23Speaker 08

  I'm 65 years old, and I suspect that you're not going to find many people my age who are bored.

• 22:30Speaker 07

  I really just want to be OK with being bored again.

• 22:33Speaker 08

  The older you get, the less bored you are, because time just goes away.

• 22:38Speaker 09

  Hi, my name is Sabrina. I am bored because I'm lazy.

• 22:41Speaker 10

  I don't even understand the concept of boredom anymore as an adult. I think the bored people will be the young ones.

• 22:48Speaker 09

  I live in Bozeman, Montana, and I am 11 years old.

• 22:52Speaker 11

  Hi, Freakonomics. My name is Ryan. I'm 28. I live in New York City.

• 22:56Speaker 10

  If I ever felt bored, I would probably just jump for joy.

• 23:01Speaker 11

  I've come to realize now I have three years sober, which I only mention because I used to think that in part I was getting high and drinking because I was bored. But in sobriety, I've come to see, and in part just as growing up, that boredom is a BS, cover-up word for loneliness. There's no such thing as boredom.

• 23:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:10Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 25:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must-haves, like gym access or breakfast, just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details.

• 25:50Speaker 12

  You asked about boredom. I'm just coming off of a long spell. I have a restaurant, and it's in the middle of Florida. But my family moves to the beach every summer. And when I'm at the beach, I'm just bored out of my mind. Like, all you can do is sit at the beach, or swim at the beach. Play with the kids a little bit. And I feel terrible, because I know that I should be happy that I have a beach house, and I'm at the beach all summer. But it gets really, really boring, and I'm not going to do it again. Next year, I'm going to come up with a plan. I don't know what that plan's going to be.

• 26:35Speaker 12

  But I'm going to have some sort of plan, where I'm not bored all summer, out of my mind, with nothing to do. My name is Satchel, and I'm 47 years old.

• 26:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  What makes you bored? One way to answer that question is to ask a different question, for which there are better data. What makes you happy and unhappy? Presumably, the stuff that makes us unhappy might also make us bored. Dan Gilbert, the psychologist who likes to give his research subjects electric shocks, he's done a lot of happiness research. He and his colleague Matt Killingsworth looked at data from more than 2,000 adults who said how happy they were during certain activities.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  When you look at what people are doing, and what they're thinking, and how they're feeling, as they go about living their everyday, normal lives, you find that people are obviously very happy when they're doing things like eating or having sex. They're not very happy when they're doing things like working or commuting.

• 27:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what about when they're just resting, like Satchel Ray, hanging out on the beach in Florida?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  The answer is, about as unhappy is when they're working or commuting.

• 27:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  But if you ask people what they see themselves doing when they retire, most of them talk about some version of rest.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Rest is the wrong answer, and we even know why from these data. When people rest, their minds wander. And when the mind wanders, it doesn't usually go to a happy place. People who are engaged in an activity are almost always happier than people who are not. So any retirement you plan that doesn't have you engaged in activities is probably not one that's going to make you happy.

• 28:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh-oh. Does this mean we need to rethink retirement, too?

• 28:18Speaker 13

  I'm kind of in a staged retirement and will be playing a little bit more golf, I think, than I have.

• 28:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Robert Willis. He's a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. Until recently, he directed the National Institute on Aging's Health and Retirement Study, or HRS.

• 28:34Speaker 13

  Which is a very large longitudinal study that's designed to follow people and their spouses from the time they enter the study in their early 50s until they die. And it collects data on a wide range of economic, health, psychological, family, and other kinds of variables.

• 28:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  The HRS is nationally representative with data on about 20,000 people so far. And it's conducted in a way that lets researchers measure the impact of retirement at different ages. The HRS is also the model for similar studies in many other countries, which makes for good international comparisons.

• 29:14Speaker 13

  The intent all the way along was to kind of ensure that the data sets were as close as possible.

• 29:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you look at international retirement ages in the late 1950s, Willis says, you won't notice much variance.

• 29:33Speaker 13

  The labor force participation rates of older men were very similar across all of the European countries, the United States, Japan, and so forth.

• 29:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  We're talking here about men aged 60 to 65. But fast forward to the 1990s, and now there's a big split.

• 29:50Speaker 13

  So that in Japan, labor force participation had remained really quite high, and the US participation had fallen some, but not dramatically. But in some countries, most notably the Netherlands and Belgium, male participation rates at those ages had fallen from something on the order of about 70% in the early period down to about 20% by the mid 1990s.

• 30:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  The difference was almost entirely accounted for, not by individuals' choices about when to retire, but retirement policies.

• 30:24Speaker 13

  The US has a relatively neutral System of taxes and pensions and the like in terms of how long people work. So for example, the social security payments that you receive are higher if you delay retirement than if you retire as early as you can. And France, on the other hand, has a lot of strong incentives to retire early. And people, in fact, do retire quite a bit earlier than in the United States.

• 30:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  For a researcher, these differences create a sort of natural experiment that can be used to help understand how early retirement affects people. And that's exactly what Robert Willis and a colleague, the economist Susan Roeder, decided to do. They wanted to learn about the relationship between retirement and mental cognition. Their instrument of choice was a memory test.

• 31:16Speaker 13

  A test that asks people to listen to a variety of very simple words.

• 31:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is an exercise that's already built into those big longitudinal retirement studies.

• 31:27Speaker 13

  Words like bird and tree.

• 31:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lake, army, car.

• 31:31Speaker 13

  Truck.

• 31:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And in Italy, France, or Germany.

• 31:34Speaker 13

  There are, of course, words in Italian or French or German. Camion.

• 31:38Speaker 11

  Uccello.

• 31:38Speaker 08

  Lastwagen.

• 31:39Speaker 13

  But psychometric techniques have been used to make sure that they provide comparable measures of memory.

• 31:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Baum. Albero. Uzo. Army. Participants hear a list of words and are asked to immediately repeat the words to the person interviewing them.

• 31:52Speaker 13

  Vuetur. Tree. Militaire.

• 31:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lago.

• 31:55Speaker 13

  And then about five or 10 minutes later in the interview, the interviewer will say, oh, remember those words that I read to you a while back? How many of those can you repeat back to me now?

• 32:07Speaker 13

  Um, bird?

• 32:09Speaker 08

  Exercito?

• 32:11Speaker 13

  Uh, camion? And so the cognitive test we have is a memory test of immediate and delayed word recall.

• 32:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what did Willis and Roeder find?

• 32:20Speaker 13

  The countries that had laws that led people to retire early, there was a really quite substantial effect on people's cognitive ability in this memory domain.

• 32:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  A downward effect, that is. Study participants from the US and other countries where older people are more likely to still work did much better than participants from countries like France and Italy, where older adults are less likely to work. American participants, for instance, scored nearly twice as well as Spanish participants. In the US, more than 50% of 60 to 64-year-olds are still in the workforce. In Spain, fewer than 30% are still working for pay. Willis calls this cognitive decline "the mental retirement effect."

• 33:03Speaker 13

  The basic idea is that if you exercise your mind and you're in a stimulating environment and you're motivated to use your mind, that you'll maintain your cognitive abilities. Conversely, if you are in an unstimulating environment, don't exercise your mind, the effect would be negative on cognition. So in that sense, it's very much like the idea that physical exercise leads to physical fitness.

• 33:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Willis is fairly confident the effect is causal, that retirement leads to lower cognitive levels. But as to the why...

• 33:37Speaker 13

  We don't really understand the underlying mechanisms very well.

• 33:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  We asked Willis whether boredom might have anything to do with the mental retirement effect.

• 33:46Speaker 13

  I must confess that when you called me, that I had not really thought about boredom, apart from occasionally thinking about my own boredom.

• 33:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  But he agreed that boredom is a plausible factor to explain the mental retirement effect, so he did some digging for us. And he found that the HRS, the Health and Retirement Study, was already thinking about this.

• 34:06Speaker 13

  There was a boredom question.

• 34:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's part of a series of psychological measures that participants are given every two years.

• 34:11Speaker 13

  So it said, during the past 30 days, to what degree did you feel bored? Not at all, a little, moderately, quite a bit, very much?

• 34:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, keep in mind, this is a survey for older Americans, 50 and up. Only about a quarter of these respondents reported feeling bored moderately to very much.

• 34:28Speaker 13

  Very much was only about 3%. So somebody who's really very bored, that's not a majority status by any means, but it's also a fairly significant number, say, they have experienced some boredom.

• 34:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Willis got curious about the correlations he might find in these data.

• 34:44Speaker 13

  And I discovered, for example, that... Being married, people who are married are significantly less bored than people who are not married. So that kind of goes to the idea that part of boredom, at least, is a matter of interactions with others, probably. And people who are not married probably have fewer interactions with others. Education is an important variable. Less educated are substantially more bored than the well-educated. So people with less than high school, about 25% of them are bored, and that falls to about 14% for the people with college degrees or graduate degrees. Work status, there are about 20% are bored among workers and about 25% among non-workers.

• 35:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  And because respondents take the survey every couple of years, Willis could see how their boredom answers changed after retirement.

• 35:34Speaker 13

  There's really quite a strong negative effect. That is, the people who were working in 2008, who subsequently did not work in 2012, were slightly more bored than they had been. On the other hand, the people who were working in 2008, who are continuing to work in 2012, had a substantial decline in boredom.

• 36:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  None of this surprised Willis very much, nor are these findings particularly robust.

• 36:09Speaker 13

  It's far from proving anything, so I wouldn't really want to go further than that.

• 36:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  But it was consistent with his earlier research on the mental retirement effect, and how that might be driven by a lack of stimulation. Which naturally leads us to circle back to the question we began with today, about worker productivity generally, and how big of a problem boredom may be.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  We just don't know that much about how boredom affects people's productivity.

• 36:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Amanda Markey, the boredom researcher.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Certainly, there's the intuition that it's got to slow you down, or make you browse the internet, or make you maybe do other things that aren't as helpful.

• 36:52Speaker 14

  We're thinking about a new project about the role of boredom in the economy.

• 36:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that is Heather Schofield.

• 36:58Speaker 14

  I'm a development economist.

• 37:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Schofield is with the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Global Development. She does a lot of work in India, and the new boredom research project she's thinking about concerns Indian farmers.

• 37:11Speaker 14

  So you're very busy when you're planting things and you're very busy when you're harvesting.

• 37:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  But agriculture being seasonal, there's also a lot of downtime. The ensuing boredom, Schofield says, may affect worker productivity.

• 37:24Speaker 14

  Where people who basically don't have a lot going on, keeping them occupied and keeping their brain moving, go into something of a stupor. And it becomes very hard to get anything done.

• 37:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that stupor, Schofield believes, can have a compounding effect.

• 37:39Speaker 14

  There's actually very good data in agronomy saying if you weed your plants maybe twice or three times in the season instead of once, you'll actually increase your yields dramatically. But maybe you end up in this kind of mental retirement state because there's not a lot going on, and it's hard to get yourself out the door to weed the plants because you can always do it the next day. So basically then, the idea is that this mental retirement or this boredom may actually, in some ways, decrease people's output even more. And conversely, if you actually get people to work more, it may crowd in labor rather than crowding out labor, which would be pretty surprising. So that is to say, if I get you to work more, it would actually make you work even more because it gets you out of the state of kind of boredom or mental retirement.

• 38:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Heather Schofield doesn't know yet whether this is true. We'll have to revisit that research down the road. But it does make sense, doesn't it? That boredom can feed on itself and make you even more bored, just as productivity can also feed on itself. So if there's even a slight chance that boredom does lower productivity...

• 38:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Shouldn't we think about alleviating boredom in the workplace?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  I think there are probably some really cheap interventions that you could do.

• 38:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Amanda Markey, you will recall, ran all those experiments trying to reduce boredom by paying people, by turning their boring task into a game. What ideas does she have for fighting workplace boredom?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  One would be a competition and recognition. We actually haven't tested competition, but I imagine what that does is that, you know, all of a sudden now you're kind of doing a different task because you're trying to do it as fast and quickly and efficiently as possible. So I think that would be pretty effective.

• 39:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  But remember, Markey now teaches high school algebra.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  I think I would go with totally gamifying a school, like always having that progress bar in terms of are you learning, are you not? How do you compare with others? And I think this would achieve the short-term goal of having students learn subjects. I really worry, though, if it's going to make kind, hard-working, persistent students, which is ultimately what we want.

• 39:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Angela Duckworth, the Penn psychologist who used to teach high school math, argues that boredom, for all its obvious downsides, may serve a useful purpose.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  We need that feedback to say like, hey, you might not be learning very much right now, you know, notice that you feel this boredom and then see where that thinking leads you, you know, now what do you think? Now that you've realized that you're bored, what do you think is really going on?

• 40:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So is boredom whether you're a teacher looking out at your classroom of students or whether you're just a person sitting there thinking about, well, I feel bored and I'm going to try to relieve my boredom and click around on the web and all of a sudden it's an hour and I feel worse in the end? Can boredom in either of those cases be what we might consider a really useful signal? Something that we should act on, but we don't really act on in necessarily a positive way for the most part?

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I generally think, I mean, if you want my secret view of like what success in life really is from a psychologist's standpoint.

• 40:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  I want your secret view of success in life.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  All right. So I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say it. You know, it's not that I have like all the, you know, a mountain of evidence and so forth, but I think it really comes down to this. Every successful person that I've ever interviewed, and I do a lot of interviewing of successful, you know, gold medalists and CEOs of Fortune 100 companies and so forth, every single one is extraordinarily metacognitive. By that, I mean that they are able to reflect on their own emotions, their own thoughts, and their own behaviors. They're sort of able to step outside themselves and say, hmm, what am I doing? What just happened there? Is that something that I liked? Did I not like it? What can I do to kind of go back into the situation and do it differently next time?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Two of one, I would say that that is characteristic of successful people. And so therefore, if you're bored, I think it's a very healthy thing to say to yourself, huh, I noticed that I spent four hours today at work. You know, my husband said this to me actually last night. He said, you know, I realized that I really hate reading construction contracts. So he's a real estate developer. And he had this moment of metacognitive insight, that he found this like the most boring part of his job. And then what he did was he like acknowledging that boredom, he's like, you know, they have to get done, right? And they actually have to get reviewed very carefully because otherwise I could lose a lot of money. So he decided to call a construction lawyer and he delegated a bunch of this stuff and he felt terrific about it.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  I think, not that every kid can delegate reading their homework assignment or delegate memorizing their time sale, you can't always do that, but that moment of metacognitive insight, to know thyself and then to say, okay, well, you know, given the situation, what could and should I do about it? I think that is truly crucial.

• 42:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  I hope we haven't bored you today. I also hope you will send us an email to [email protected] with any examples of how an episode of Freakonomics Radio has changed the way you think or live, maybe some problem you've solved, maybe some enemy you've defeated. Let us know. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, what is the one ingredient that most kitchens are severely lacking? Science. I think a lot of people think of science as sort of the opposite of tradition or the opposite of natural. And really, it's not. The science of cooking and also the science of eating, how some foods, for instance, aren't nearly as nutritious as you might think.

• 43:13Speaker 15

  Veterinarians don't even recommend it as rabbit food because there's not enough nutrients to support the health of rabbits.

• 43:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Today's episode was produced by Christopher Wirth. Our staff also includes Irva Gunja, Greg Rosalsky, Jake Howitt, Merritt Jacob, Kasia Mahalovich, Caroline English, and Alison Hockenberry. We had help from Nigar Fatale. We'd also like to thank Maureen Boudot, Giuseppe Santo Chirico, Rupert Allman, and Danya Ravasani. And if you want even more Freakonomics, the books, the blog, side projects, and so on, come visit us at Freakonomics.com. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, and don't forget, subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever else you get your

• 44:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  free weekly podcasts. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9 milligrams, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill.

• 44:41Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 45:20Speaker 16

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• 46:20Speaker 17

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