Department of Psychology, University of Limerick, Castletroy, Ireland.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2011 Dec;37(12):1679-91. doi: 10.1177/0146167211418530. Epub 2011 Aug 15.
People who feel bored experience that their current situation is meaningless and are motivated to reestablish a sense of meaningfulness. Building on the literature that conceptualizes social identification as source of meaningfulness, the authors tested the hypothesis that boredom increases the valuation of ingroups and devaluation of outgroups. Indeed, state boredom increased the liking of an ingroup name (Study 1), it increased hypothetical jail sentences given to an outgroup offender (Study 2 and Study 3), especially in comparison to an ingroup offender (Study 3), it increased positive evaluations of participants' ingroups, especially when ingroups were not the most favored ones to begin with (Study 4), and it increased the appreciation of an ingroup symbol, mediated by people's need to engage in meaningful behavior (Study 5). Several measures ruled out that these results could be explained by other affective states. These novel findings are discussed with respect to boredom, social identity, and existential psychology research.
感到无聊的人会觉得自己目前的处境毫无意义，并会努力重新建立有意义的感觉。基于将社会认同概念化为意义之源的文献，作者检验了这样一个假设：无聊会增加对群体内的评价和对群体外的贬低。事实上，状态无聊会增加对群体内名称的喜爱（研究 1），它会增加对群体外罪犯的假设监禁判决（研究 2 和研究 3），尤其是与群体内罪犯相比（研究 3），它会增加对参与者群体内的积极评价，尤其是当群体内最初不是最受欢迎的群体时（研究 4），并且它会增加对群体内符号的欣赏，这是由人们进行有意义行为的需要所介导的（研究 5）。多项措施排除了这些结果可以用其他情感状态来解释的可能性。这些新发现是根据无聊、社会认同和存在主义心理学研究来讨论的。
