Bored of sports? Investigating the interactive role of engagement and value as predictors of boredom in athletic training.

Abstract

Recent research has identified boredom as a guiding signal in goal-directed behavior. As boredom activates a search for more valuable activities, it can consequently challenge goal-directed behavior; this is also expected to be the case in the sporting context. Here, we examined the experience of boredom in athletic training for a competition among 153 athletes with a cross-sectional questionnaire. We developed the questionnaire based on theoretical approaches to boredom. Specifically, we considered two core triggers of boredom (i.e., the ability to remain engaged with the training and the value that athletes ascribe to the training). We found that the positive relationship between the difficulty of engagement in athletic training and the experience of boredom was moderated by the value ascribed to the training. In other words, it seems that the value ascribed to the training can play a protective role, in that high levels of value nullify the positive relationship between difficulty of engagement and boredom experienced in sports. Future research is needed to better understand the antecedents and consequences of boredom experiences in specific sporting contexts, which could be achieved, for example, by differentiating between individual and collective activities or competitions and training situations.

On the specifics of valuing effort: a developmental and a formalized perspective on preferences for cognitive and physical effort

“…A better understanding of when we get bored is highly relevant because research shows that boredom is a driving force for many adaptive and maladaptive behavioral choices 47 , and has even been identified as a general confound in behavioral science research 48 . Boredom arises when we engage in activities that are of low value 49,50 . If people ascribe little value to physical or cognitive effort, they will thus experience these efforts as boring, with downstream negative consequences on their attention 51 , motivation 52 , self-control 13,46 and performance 53 .…”

Development and validation of the Value of Physical Effort (VoPE) scale

“…We also found evidence for a negative link between the value of physical effort and exercise-related boredom . Boredom is a value-based experience (Martarelli et al, 2023), which makes it plausible that people get bored by sports and exercise because they ascribe little value to the physical effort involved. Further, people tend to avoid and escape boring activities (Bieleke et al, 2022), making boredom a likely mechanism involved in the negative association between VoPE scores and sports and exercise behavior.…”

Methodological approaches to boredom and its measurement

“…It is reasonable to assume that there are differences between domains and, at the same time, that boredom-prone individuals might report having experienced boredom more intensely and more frequently across domains (see also the notion of a "holistic perception of life being boring," described by . Several studies show associations between boredom proneness (e.g., measured with the BPS) and the assessment of boredom in the academic context (Farmer & Sundberg, 1986), the sporting context (Martarelli et al, 2023), or the work context (Baratta & Spence, 2018). To our knowledge, no study has compared the answers to different domain-specific scales and domain-general scales to give a precise estimation of the variance explained by a domain-general factor and that which is domain-specific.…”