A search of PsycInfo doesn’t turn up a lot, but what it does show up suggests that intelligence and proneness to boredom are not correlated and that they load on different factors. There’s no evidence to support your suggestion that intelligent people are more likely to get bored.
Ferrari, Joseph R. Procrastination and attention: Factor analysis of attention deficit, boredomness, intelligence, self-esteem, and task delay frequencies. Journal of Social Behavior & Personality. Vol.15(5), 2000, pp. 185-196.
Hill, A. B. (1975). Work variety and individual differences in occupational boredom. Journal of Applied Psychology. Vol.60(1), Feb 1975, pp. 128-131.
Sometimes you have to take the closest available information. You might not be able to find data that specifically addresses your worry. It’s quite likely that the best information available from which to determine whether or not people will find work that is beneath them tedious is the information that Hentor provided, regardless that it’s only tangentially related.
Particularly if you have shown no sign of providing actual data to support your assertion, then any data – no matter how tangentially related – still trumps your baseless assertion.
Well, the fact that no-one has addressed what I actually said has left me confused about what it is I’m supposed to defend.
I’m saying that:
People often find tasks that are mentally unstimulating boring.
What is considered mentally unstimulating differs from person to person (and, I may as well add now; within a person’s lifetime).
Does anyone actually doubt either of these assertions? Just so I know what it is I’m supposed to find cites for.
btw it’s not fair to call what I’ve said baseless, as I already mentioned the concept of “flow” in psychology, which implicitly includes both of my assertions above and is supported by numerous studies and published theory.
You keep dancing around between just implying and outright saying that people with higher IQ will likely be more affected by the tediousness of tasks. This means that IQ should be correlated with proneness to tediousness, but there’s no evidence for this. If your wiki page spells out any model as to how or why flow and intelligence are related, please be so kind as to point it out more clearly.
If you are not asserting a relationship between being prone to tedium, flow or intelligence, then I don’t see how it is relevant to this discussion in any way.
Data can be misleading data if it is only tangentially related or even irrelevant to the actual question. Bad data can be much worse than no data at all.
In this case there is of course a whole body of experience with what happens when high IQ individuals are forced to perform tasks that are well below their intellectual capability and not given tasks that utilize their intellects. That body of experience was the basis for gifted education programs. Do you really need cites for that? Most of us have seen it: students who are given tasks that are not challenging (“comfortably within their ability”) often are bored and sometimes can even become problematic behaviorally; students who are challenged to the level of their ability not so much so. We all live it as well: a task at the cusp of our ability to master, but just at the cusp, is fun; a task that is too easy is … boring. And of course what task is at the cusp for each individual, and therefore which task is fun or boring, varies according to individual ability.
I state that with out presenting any data, yet it is more on point than the “tangentially related” data presented.
Just like making a gifted child who can do advanced algebra sit through second grade math will bore him, forcing an adult to perform only tasks that present no intellectual challenge will have bad results: they will find the same task tedious that someone of lesser intellect may find at the cusp of their ability. That is directly related to this silly thought experiment.
In any case, the op was trying to make a point with this thought experiment, but it was a straw man point. Very few people believe that IQ tests tell us nothing beyond the ability to take that test, even if they state something similar in a fit of hyperbolic rhetoric. The debates are usually between those who believe that IQ measure a generic intelligence and those who believe that intelligence is much more domain specific and that there are intelligences that IQ does not measure well. And between those who believe that IQ is highly important, and those who believe that other traits are at least as telling. Usually it gets confounded into discussions where some, ala “The Bell Curve”, try to claim that group differences in IQ are highly significant and reveal much about the overall intellectual ability of different subpoplations.
Yes, IQ, reveals something about some slice of intellectual ability, and a slice that correlates well with educational and professional success in the Western world. Nothing really to debate about that. How much, how much the test is culturally specific, how important compared to other factors, and a host of other questions … those are the more contentious issues. And this thought experiment informs naught on them.
1975? I don’t have anything better, so I shouldn’t complain.
I would like to know the range of IQ’s of the women in the study. I suspect there were few if any in the group with IQ’s above say, 105 or so, to test. So, if you have a restricted range of low to average IQ’d subjects there probably would be no significant correlation with intelligence and boredom measures. Put the full range of ability in that group and you have a different outcome, I think.
I imagine the women factory workers in WWII presented a broader group and were either more bored/creative or both.
No. This is the link that you are making, it’s not what I’m saying at all.
If some people have a higher threshold of task that they find mentally unstimulating, does it follow that those people will often be bored?
The answer is no, or at least, it doesn’t entail logically.
You might just as well conclude that tall people will often wear trousers that are too short, since for a given length of trouser, they will be more likely to find them short.
But DSeid has put it very well. No-one seriously doubts the point I’ve made, and it clearly has relevance to the OP.
I worked with programmers at the GM Tech .Center that requires dynamite to get them to go home. They were obsessed with soling a problem and it was all they could think of. I know some people that were nuts about grade in college. They had to get the 4.0. Yet obsession does not necessarily make a good employee. There are lots of dealing with employees and management that they might be pretty bad at.
DSeid, that’s just the biggest load of horse-hooey. If you want a board that prefers gut feelings to data, I think you’re just in the wrong place. Fortunately, most people prefer science and empiricism around here.
But yes, please provide a cite, rather than your intuition. The problem with the reams of observation about gifted kids is that the observations are entirely subject to selection bias. Which smart kids are bored with the material? Well, the ones that are showing how bored they are. You look to actual data in order to determine what is generally true in the population.
Show me the evidence from studies that demonstrate what your suggesting. Please don’t argue against a scientific approach. That’s just bullshit, and scary from a medical professional. For example, plenty of people observed that their kids developed autism after receiving vaccinations. Do we really need data to tell us what’s true about what we’ve all seen regarding the link between vaccine and autism?
Hentor please show me studies that prove people often smile when they are happy. If you cannot provide me with those cites I must conclude that any claim that people smile when happy is horse-hooey and just bullshit. And please show me the study that shows that morning often means an increase in natural light levels.
You are really going to take the position that gifted children do not often get bored in a regular classrooms and that people do not generally most enjoy tasks that are challenging just up to but not over their capability to handle? You want controlled (and likely double blinded) studies that prove those things?
Really? Wow.
Just wow. That’s a “cite please” parody. You sure you aint just whooshing me? No, you are serious? Then again: wow.
No, I won’t spend the time literature searching to find the original studies to comply with your demand for the “scientific method” in this case.
Obviously given my original post I wouldnt have thought boredom and IQ would be uncorrelated with mundane tasks either, but this is exactly the kind of issue thats good to test empirically.
I wouldnt call one study conclusive but it beats what I can offer in response.
I disagree. A meta-study is only as good as the studies it aggregates.
I didn’t say it wasn’t a valid study. Just not a convincing one.
Do you even know what the wordmeans in a statistical context? It most definitely is not just “what it is”. Mate.
No. Meta-studies are often flawed or else merely inconclusive. I am more convinced by experimental studies with a decent methodology I can sink my teeth into. Not that statistics doesn’t have its place, but the way most meta-studies are done isn’t it for me.
I’m not going to be convinced by any one or two studies, you know. I’m aware there’s a whole anti-threshold theory clade (mostly coming from the school for the gifted sector, quelle surprise.) But they’re going to have to do a lot more experimental testing to convince me, and with better creativity tests than say, the BIS. Of course they’re going to get a higher correlation throughout when they use an overall intelligence test like the BIS rather than a specialized test like the TTCTs.
But Torrance did this stuff for 40 years. He wrote hundred of papers on it. And creativity testing was his métier. Yes, there are certainly holes to be picked at and theories to be revised, but it’s going to take more, and more rigorous, experimental work to overturn threshold theory as the most convincing option for me, based or the mass of Torrance (and Guildford)'s work.
DSeid, some gifted kids are prone to being bored, some are not. Some smart people can use their mental capacities to make a tedious task less tedious. Some smart people can engage in off-task cognitive activities and not have their performance on the tedious task suffer. Some can’t.
If this tangent is on point, then it must have some relevance to the performance of two groups selected to differ on IQ. Mijin cannot seem to decide if he is asserting that it does or it does not. You appear to want us to believe that it does just because you say so. That may work when you are talking to the nursing staff, but around here, your opinion and a quarter will get you, well, nothing these days. (By the way, does everyone you know smile when they are happy? You must not have spent time around many real New Englanders, then.)
I was a gifted student. Sure, they pulled us out for enrichment for an hour or so every week. Our regular educational programming was tracked into “Beacons and Banners” (I was a Beacon!). I didn’t get excited by most of the work, nor did most of my cohort, but most everyone completed it just fine without breaking into tears of boredom or throwing chairs around the room. Similarly, some of the enriched content was not particularly exciting, either. We did what we needed to get the work done, perhaps used our intelligence to make it as interesting as possible, and looked for excitement in other things, just like people do as adults and just like the people in Jane’s group will.
If you want to suggest that in general selecting a group of people based on their having a high IQ will get you a group of people more prone to boredom, just prove it. “I’m not going to be bothered to find a cite” is just a weak cop-out.
No, you just seem to have an aversion to reading anyone else’s posts.
You have not attempted to debate anything I’ve actually said.
You just keep throwing this straw man at me – that smart people in general should be more prone to boredom. I have asserted no such thing, in fact I’ve spelt out in no uncertain terms that that is not my position. That’s the tangent we’re on: a groundhog day of you throwing the same non sequitur at me.
I’m saying that the people in the particular situation of the OP might find the work boring. There’s no contadiction in that.
Yeah yeah … another gifted. Amazing how everyone here is or was. Nice, you are gifted. I am happy for you.
To the best of my knowledge I am not gifted, but, as I have already said, the op’s thought experiment is a boring bit of triviality/straw man to me anyway, and I will decline to spend too much time digging up cites trying to “prove” personal observations on boring subjects.
Still your point and tone here require a response:
Cites and double blinded control experiments are all well and good, but some points can be made without them. There are some things that do not have double blinded control experiments readily available about. Things like “people often smile when happy … even in New England” - that most people will accept on the basis of their shared common experiences and observations. Few would ever bother doing a study to prove it because they see it every day, just like they personally experience being bored by repetitive unchallenging tasks and enjoy mastering something just at the cusp of their ability. Yes, our experiences are our cites in some instances. These items, and logic, are as admissible to any reasonable debate between reasonable individuals as are quality published cites, and better than crappy ones. Any reader, from you to anyone else, is welcome to decide for themselves if their personal observations and experiences substantiate whatever claim is made, or if they believe the personal experience being referenced, just like they should be critical of the quality of any published cite offered up.
“Cite please” is often a fair game but your snarky use of it is mockworthy at best.
And your persistent misunderstanding of the clear point made makes one really doubt your claim of having been “gifted”: people tend to get bored when not engaged by the task at hand (no, I have no cite); less bright people may find some tasks and subjects engaging that would not engage an extremely bright person … and visa versa for that matter (also no cite); any complete factory has jobs that are challenging and engaging to different intellectual levels and interests (amazingly again, no cite); forcing a bright person to do a task that is, for them, very mundane, is likely to result in less job satisfaction and more boredom than is having someone do that task for who it is an appropriate level of challenge and is therefore engaging (still again, oh my, no cite) just as much as forcing someone who is less bright to listen to a lecture about something they do not understand will bore them (and another time of no cite). No the bright people are not more prone to boredom and no one has claimed that.
