There was an interesting and sometimes hilarious front page article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (Feb. 26) about the study of monotony and boredom — Interesting Fact: There’s a Yawing Need for Boring Professors. What caught my eye was the ways the researchers try to bore their subjects.
“But finding a clip to induce boredom was a trickier task. Dr. Danckert first tried a YouTube video of a man mowing a lawn but the subjects found it funny, not boring. A clip of parlimentary proceedings was too risky. ‘There’s the off chance you get someone who is interested in that’, he says. Finally, a colleague shot her own video of family members hanging laundry and asking for clothespins. The nearly four-minute clip turned out to be just dull enough, Dr. Danckert says.”
What is just dull enough? And why and to whom?