Abstract：
Despite people\'s general desire to avoid cognitive effort, there is a limit to our parsimony: boredom, a state defined by a lack of successful mental engagement, is found to be similarly aversive. The work presented here investigates how context - the alternative tasks present and the environmental context - impacts people\'s aversion to exerting cognitive effort and avoiding boredom via a demand-selection task. In a population of undergraduate students, we assessed how people\'s willingness to exert mental effort (in a working memory task) is affected by the presence of an easier alternative (less cognitively demanding) or a boring alternative (doing nothing at all). To manipulate environmental context, we conducted the experiment online, where participants completed the task remotely, and in a controlled laboratory setting. We find people willingly seek out effortful tasks to avoid boredom, despite avoiding high demands when both tasks on offer required some effort. We also find large effects of the participants\' environmental context, with preferences for the most demanding task increasing by over 150% in the lab compared to online. These results bear relevance to theories that argue the costs of effort are determined relative to the alternatives available (e.g., opportunity cost theories). Moreover, the results demonstrate that researchers who deliberately (or inadvertently) manipulate effort and boredom must consider the effects context (both choice and environmental) may have on people\'s behaviour.
摘要：
尽管人们普遍希望避免认知努力，我们的吝啬有一个极限:无聊，一种由缺乏成功的心理参与定义的状态，被发现同样令人厌恶。这里介绍的工作调查了背景-现有的替代任务和环境背景-如何影响人们对通过需求选择任务进行认知努力和避免无聊的厌恶。在一群本科生中，我们评估了人们（在工作记忆任务中）施加脑力的意愿如何受到更简单的选择（认知要求较低）或无聊的选择（根本不做任何事情）的影响。为了操纵环境背景，我们在网上做了这个实验,参与者远程完成任务，在受控的实验室环境中。我们发现人们愿意寻找费力的任务来避免无聊，尽管避免了高要求，当两个任务都需要一些努力时。我们还发现参与者的环境背景有很大的影响，与在线相比，实验室对最苛刻任务的偏好增加了150%以上。这些结果与理论相关，这些理论认为努力成本是相对于可用的替代方案确定的(例如，机会成本理论)。此外，结果表明，故意（或无意中）操纵努力和无聊的研究人员必须考虑上下文（选择和环境）对人们行为的影响。
