Would you shock yourself rather than sit alone 15 minutes?
Wilson et al. (2014): 12 of 18 men and 6 of 24 women shocked themselves rather than sit alone. What it means for how to make life more exciting.
In this article6 sections
The room was nearly bare. A participant sat down, was told to remain in the chair and think, and was left with a single button that delivered an electric shock. Beforehand, each of them had felt that shock and said they would pay money to avoid it. Fifteen minutes later, many had pressed the button anyway.
That is the best-known experiment in the research literature on boredom, and it turns up whenever someone writes about how to make life more exciting. Wilson and seven colleagues published it in Science in 2014 under the title “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind” (volume 345, pages 75 to 77). The usual retelling goes: humans cannot stand their own company, so we chase stimulation, so you probably need more excitement in your life. Each step in that chain is weaker than it sounds, and the weak spots are where the useful advice is hiding.
What happened in the shock experiment
The paper reports 11 studies in total. In most of them, people were asked to spend 6 to 15 minutes alone in an unadorned room with no phone, no reading material and no writing implements, then rate the experience. Average enjoyment came out around 5 on a 9-point scale, and about half of participants rated it at or below the midpoint, according to the BPS Research Digest’s summary. Participants reported trouble concentrating and a wandering mind. Introverts and extraverts did about equally badly, and the pattern held in a community sample with a mean age of 48 and in a study where people sat at home.
The shock experiment is a separate piece of the paper. Participants who said they liked shocks were excluded. The rest sat for 15 minutes with a button available. By the figures reported in secondary coverage (the Spring PsyBlog write-up gives the counts), 12 of 18 men and 6 of 24 women administered at least one shock to themselves. That is the “two thirds of men, a quarter of women” line. One man pressed the button 190 times; the BPS digest reports he was excluded from the analysis.
A definition worth keeping: the disengaged mind is Wilson’s term for a mind with no external task, no stimulus and no goal, left to generate its own content. The paper’s claim is that most people find that state aversive enough to prefer something else, even something unpleasant. The authors put it as most people seeming “to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing.”
| Finding | Number | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Studies in the paper | 11 | Wilson et al., Science, 2014 |
| Time alone | 6 to 15 minutes | Wilson et al., 2014 |
| Mean enjoyment of thinking alone | about 5 on a 9-point scale | BPS Research Digest summary |
| Shock-experiment sample | 18 men, 24 women | Spring PsyBlog summary (second-hand) |
| Gave themselves at least one shock | 12 of 18 men (67%), 6 of 24 women (25%) | same |
| Prior stance on the shock | Said they would pay to avoid it | Wilson et al., 2014 |
| Extreme case | One man, 190 presses, excluded from analysis | BPS Research Digest |
Why the popular reading overreaches
Start with the sample. Forty-two people is small, and the gap between 12 of 18 and 6 of 24 comes from a few individuals either way. The authors flagged that the shock result needs testing outside student samples and in other cultures. They also offered an explanation for the sex difference, higher sensation-seeking in men, as a suggestion rather than something they tested. Exclusions matter too: dropping shock-enjoyers and the 190-press participant is defensible, and it also means the headline percentages describe a filtered group.
Then the setting. The room was engineered to remove every ordinary source of stimulation. Real idle time is not like that. Real idle time has a window, a kettle, a stranger’s coat, the possibility of a text. Nederkoorn, Vancleef, Wilkenhöner, Claes and Havermans (Psychiatry Research, 2016) ran a related experiment on 69 students, split among sad, neutral and boredom conditions. The boredom group, who watched an 83-second clip on a one-hour loop, shocked themselves more than the neutral group. The sad-film group did not. So the thing driving the button was monotony with nothing else on offer, and the authors framed the shocks as a way to break up that monotony, since they were the only external stimulation available.
Third, the explanation. Wilson’s team suggested that people have difficulty controlling their thoughts and steering them to pleasant places. That is a hypothesis. Nothing in the shock experiment tested it, and the thinking-alone studies tell against an easy fix: the effect held even when people prepared pleasant things to think about beforehand, per the BPS summary.
Fourth, the generalisation. A 2019 replication led by Buttrick (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, volume 117) tested 2,557 participants at 12 sites in 11 countries. Doing a chosen solitary activity beat thinking for pleasure everywhere, so the core preference travels. But enjoyment of thinking varied by country, and the authors reported those differences were accounted for by five individual traits: need for cognition, openness, meditation experience and starting mood on the positive side, and reported phone use on the negative one. Some people are simply better at this, and the skill looks trainable.
And the counterweight. Hatano, Ogulmus, Shigemasu and Murayama (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022; I have the details from abstracts and press coverage, not the full paper) ran six experiments with 259 participants and found that people enjoyed idle waiting more than they predicted beforehand. Fear of the empty room outran the room.
What “I need more excitement” usually means
Put these together and the story changes. The experiment did not show that people need excitement. It showed that people in a stripped-down room with an instruction to think would take almost any input over none, and that the aversion is partly a forecasting error. Wanting a button to press is not the same as wanting a more thrilling life.
Look at what the button actually offered: an event. Something happened, caused by you, that was not the previous minute repeated. If you read “excitement” as intensity (a trip, a new job, a dramatic change), the study does not support it, because the participants were not choosing intensity. They were choosing change from a baseline of nothing, and they were choosing it within minutes.
That distinction matters because the intensity route is the expensive one and the one that wears off. Big changes tend to settle into the new normal, a point the awe-walk piece takes from the other direction by asking how little it takes to feel a week get bigger. The flat feeling people describe when they search “why is my life so boring” is usually less about low intensity than about low variation: the same route, the same screen, the same ten people, the same Tuesday. Variation is cheap. Intensity is not.
There is a second reading worth holding. Some of what feels like boredom is a craving for resolution, a question that is open and interesting. Loewenstein’s 1994 information-gap account of curiosity, covered in this piece on what makes a question itch, gives a more practical handle than “seek excitement”: you do not need more stimulation, you need an unfinished question you actually care about. A shock button is the crudest possible gap-closer. It at least closes one.
Where the evidence stops
In summary, the studies show that many people dislike unstructured solitary time in lab conditions and that some of them will pick an unpleasant stimulus over none. They do not show that your life is boring, that excitement is a need, that thoughts are bad company, or that filling every gap with a device is harmless. Nor do they show the reverse. The only reliable lesson is narrower. The reflex to fill a gap is strong, it fires faster than judgment, and prediction of how a quiet stretch will feel is biased downwards.
Reaching for the phone is the everyday version of the button. The Buttrick team’s finding that heavier reported phone use goes with lower enjoyment of thinking is a correlation, and it could run either way, but it fits.
Five cheap ways to add novelty this week
None of these needs money or a plan beyond Sunday evening.
- Change one leg of a route you do daily. Walk the other side of the street, get off one stop early, take the long way to the shop. Variation in what you see is the lowest-cost novelty there is. For a full hour of this, the flaneur walk gives a structure.
- Run the six-minute test once. Sit somewhere ordinary with the phone in another room and rate it from 1 to 9. If you score 5, you match the study average. If it is higher, you have learned something about yourself that the lab data could not tell you.
- Pick one open question and chase it for three days. Why does a particular building look the way it does, how did a family recipe change, who first made the thing you use daily. A real gap, not a content feed.
- Ask someone a question you do not know the answer to. A person you see weekly and have never asked about their first job or the worst place they ever lived. People are the most varied material in your week.
- Move one fixed thing by an hour. Eat dinner at a different time, shift your workout, do the dull errand at night. Small schedule shifts change what you notice without changing what you own.
Expect modest results. The aim is to test the variation hypothesis cheaply before paying for the intensity one.
The morning version of the same reflex
The first minute after waking is a small-scale replica of Wilson’s room: nothing structured yet, a stretch of unstimulated mind, and a device within reach that offers an immediate event. The reflex that reaches for a shock button is the same one that reaches for the screen. DontSnooze (https://dontsnooze.io) asks you to record a short video when the alarm goes off, and sends a random photo from your camera roll to friends you chose if you do not, so the first action of the day is one you picked instead of one your hand picked.
The question the shock studies leave open is whether the dislike of the empty room is fixed or learned. The cross-country differences tied to meditation experience and phone use hint at the second. If so, the useful response to “my life is boring” may be less a hunt for more things and more a few minutes a day of practising what the participants in that room could not do for fifteen.
Capping the apps that fill those gaps has at least one controlled test behind it: three weeks at about 30 minutes a day. And a short, planned switch away from a task, as in this vigilance study on brief breaks, may beat filling the gap with a feed.