High boredom proneness and the (in)tolerance of disruptions to agency.

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

V. Baaba Dadzie¹ (bbdadzie@uwaterloo.ca), James Danckert¹; ¹University of Waterloo

Recent work from our lab and others shows that those high in boredom proneness report feeling diminished levels of agency. In other work, we have shown that boredom proneness is unrelated to the perception of agency in others – that is, the highly boredom prone do not struggle to perceive agency external to themselves. Here, we investigated the possibility that the highly boredom prone would be more sensitive (and less tolerant) to disruptions in agency. We had participants play the video game Pong, with gradual introduction of a delay between the initiation of movements of the paddle in the game and actual movement on the screen as a means to disrupting agency. In addition, participants had the option to reset the game at any time. For those who reset the game at least two times during the 20 minutes of play, we found that boredom proneness was predictive of the total number of resets and the time in between resets. That is, those higher in boredom proneness tended to reset the game more frequently and did so at lower levels of disruption to their agency. Further work is needed to determine how this intolerance of disruptions to agency might influence (or be influenced by) the failure to launch into action that is characteristic of boredom proneness.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other