ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2020
Bored Into Depletion? Toward a Tentative Integration of Perceived Self-Control Exertion and Boredom as Guiding Signals for Goal-Directed Behavior.
Article in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 161 citations in OpenAlex.
- Assessing the Evidential Value of Mental Fatigue and Exercise Research.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2023Pooled it
- Individualized Cognitive Effort to Failure Does Not Affect Subsequent Strenuous Physical Performance.Medicine and science in sports and exercise · 2025Trial
- Tuning out: boredom, mind-wandering and flow in classical musicians.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Short video addiction is associated with students' academic disengagement: a moderated mediation analysis.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Day-to-day fluctuations in cognitive precision predict the domain-general intention-behavior gap.Science advances · 2026Article
- Perception of effort decreases with motor sequence learning.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Current Practices for Mental Fatigue Quantification and Induction in Movement Science: Introducing the SPeCIFY Guidelines.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2025Review
- Boredom signals deviation from a cognitive homeostatic set point.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- The association between boredom proneness, functional status, and views on ageing in geriatric patients.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- A reward self-bias leads to more optimal foraging for ourselves than others.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- People are increasingly bored in our digital age.Communications psychology · 2024Review
- The Effects of Mental Fatigue on Anaerobic Power and Power Endurance Performance.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Self-controlled responses to COVID-19: Self-control and uncertainty predict responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Relationship between Depression and Cognitive Inhibition in Men with Heroin or Methamphetamine Use Disorder in First-Time Mandatory Detoxification.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Consumed by Boredom: Food Choice Motivation and Weight Changes during the COVID-19 Pandemic.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Boredom is the root of all evil-or is it? A psychometric network approach to individual differences in behavioural responses to boredom.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- 24 Hours on the Run-Does Boredom Matter for Ultra-Endurance Athletes' Crises?International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Boredom Proneness Predicts Self-Assessed Decision Errors in Sports but Is Unrelated to Risk Taking in General.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- A plausible link between the time-on-task effect and the sequential task effect.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Tracking Self-Control - Task Performance and Pupil Size in a Go/No-Go Inhibition Task.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.