Boredom & risk

On boredom and risk:

For most people, boredom is a passing, nearly trivial feeling that lifts as soon as your number is called, a task is completed or a lecture ends. But boredom has a darker side: Easily bored people are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance.

I'm dying to use the word alexithymia (students who scored high on scales of alexithymia—difficulty in describing or identifying feelings, distinguishing between bodily sensations and feelings, and an inhibited inner emotional and fantasy life—also tended to be bored).

In fact, direct manipulation of attention can lead to boredom. In a classic experiment from 1989, James Laird at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., found that low-level distraction—by way of a quiet television in the next room—caused participants to find a reading task "boring."

These results support the idea that we label tasks as boring when they require a great deal of focused effort to hold our attention. In the 1970s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is now at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., coined the term "flow psychology"—the idea that great absorption, focus and enjoyment of work results from a balance between our skills and the challenge of the tasks we face.

Both tasks that are too dull, such as factory work, or too complicated, such as doing taxes, feel tedious. Of course we all differ in our ability to focus, see the beauty and complexity of our surroundings, or ascribe meaning to our actions. We also differ in our interest or knowledge of an area. "You might love something that I would consider incredibly mundane," Vodanovich says. "I have some good friends who love classical music and I cannot stand it."

Compare this with the following: Myron Scholes, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, and a principal of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), which went belly-up in the late 1990s.

He says he feels like the woman in the local paper who, whatever she does, will always be remembered for one thing: "Mrs. Jones, who was falsely accused of the ax murder of her husband in 1944, recently had a garden party for 10 of her friends."

Anyway, what he has to say about risk:

A better description would be a lifelong student of risk, and why we humans need risk, how we manage it and why we'd be unhappy without it.

Start with the commonplace that risk is one side of a coin whose other side is reward. "We all have a taste for it," he says. "In life, it would be kind of boring if there was no risk. On the other hand if there's too much risk, too much uncertainty, too much chaos, we can't handle it either. We simultaneously want order and disorder, simultaneously want risk and quiescence."

Our conversation, at his suburban New York headquarters, takes place just before the recent market gyrations, but his analysis has a greater ring of verisimilitude than many that filled the media this week. "Right now," according to Mr. Scholes, "we're quiet because the lion is tame, and maybe it's the central bankers of the world who are keeping it tame." And thus, "Individuals will say, oh, things are now quiescent and will be forever, and they'll take more risk again."

So is it the case that even people who are temporarily bored will engage in risk-seeking behavior?