Fast-forward to boredom: How switching behavior on digital media makes people more bored.

Boredom is unpleasant, with people going to great lengths to avoid it. One way to escape boredom and increase stimulation is to consume digital media, for example watching short videos on YouTube or TikTok. One common way that people watch these videos is to switch between videos and fast-forward through them, a form of viewing we call digital switching. Here, we hypothesize that people consume media this way to avoid boredom, but this behavior paradoxically intensifies boredom. Across seven experiments (total