Boredom as Information Processing: How Revisiting Ideas from Orin Klapp (1986) Inform the Psychology of Boredom

Almost forty years ago, sociologist Orin Klapp penned a treatise on boredom couched in terms of information processing. His essential claim was that boredom would arise at both low and high rates of information change. At the low end, there was too much redundancy and monotony, with any new piece of information failing to add meaning to what was already known. At the high end, noisy and chaotic barrages of information preclude meaning making and result in boredom. In essence, this can be seen as a drive to find a Goldilocks’ zone of information processing. While this theory of boredom is intriguing and clearly fits within other meaning-based accounts of the experience, there has been little direct experimental testing of the idea. This piece first characterizes Klapp’s theory before presenting what evidence there is that boredom arises at both high and low ends of various domains related to information processing (e.g., difficulty, challenge). Next, we discuss recent computational accounts that suggest a similar role for boredom in optimally processing information. We end with a call for more research to test Klapp’s model of boredom.