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In this paper, Chair of Sport Psychology member Wanja Wolff collaborated with Corinna Martarelli (Swiss Distance University Institute) to introduce a new tentative working model on the function of boredom and the sensations that accompany the allocation of self-control in jointly guiding goal-directed behavior. In addition, they highlight how boredom might have unwillingly been introduced as a confound into research on ego depletion, the long-dominant explanation of self-control failures, thereby making it difficult to truly assess the merit of the ego depletion concept. The full abstract of the paper can be found below:

“During the past two decades, self-control research has been dominated by the strength model of self-control, which is built on the premise that the capacity for self-control is a limited global resource that can become temporarily depleted, resulting in a state called ego depletion. The foundations of ego depletion have recently been questioned. Thus, although self-control is among the most researched psychological concepts with high societal relevance, an inconsistent body of literature limits our understanding of how self-control operates. Here, we propose that the inconsistencies are partly due to a confound that has unknowingly and systematically been introduced into the ego-depletion research: boredom. We propose that boredom might affect results of self-control research by placing an unwanted demand on self-control and signaling that one should explore behavioral alternatives. To account for boredom in self-controlled behavior, we provide a working model that integrates evidence from reward-based models of self-control and recent theorizing on boredom to explain the effects of both self-control exertion and boredom on subsequent self-control performance. We propose that task-induced boredom should be systematically monitored in self-control research to assess the validity of the ego-depletion effect.”

This contribution brings together to fields that had not been integrated before. This is important because research in boredom and in self-control seems to use similar methods to induce either boredom or self-control demands, thereby making the outlined confound very likely. In addition, because it focuses on the function of the sensations we experience while being bored or applying self-control, it can be a useful framework for investigating behaviors where these sensations are likely. This might be particularly important to better understand why people often struggle with the adoption of healthy behaviors, like regular exercise.

The paper can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620921394

The bibliographic information of the paper: Wolff, W., & Martarelli, C. S. (2020). Bored Into Depletion? Toward a Tentative Integration of Perceived Self-Control Exertion and Boredom as Guiding Signals for Goal-Directed Behavior. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1745691620921394 [advance online publication].