State boredom but not boredom proneness influences judgements of agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent work demonstrated that boredom prone individuals report diminished levels of agency. We examined the possibility that diminished agency was due to differences in judgements of agency external to the self. That is, do the boredom prone lack agency because they do not accurately perceive agency? We had three independent samples watch the classic Heider & Simmel (1944) animation in which geometric shapes are perceived to be agentic. Study 1 showed in two samples ( n = 180 and 220) that trait boredom proneness failed to explain any variance in perceptual judgements of agency. Ratings of state boredom did, however, negatively predict judgements of agency. In a second study ( n = 155), we replicated this effect between state boredom and agency. Next, we examined whether a disengaged attentional state, characteristic of state boredom, was responsible for this diminished perception of agency. Attentional performance fully mediated the relationship between state boredom and judgements of agency. These results suggest that the lack of agency among the highly boredom prone is unlikely to be due to deficiencies in perceiving agency. In contrast, the relation between state boredom and agency is at least in part due to diminished attention to the events being judged. • The highly boredom prone have no challenges perceiving agency external to themselves • In the moment feelings of boredom are associated with diminished judgements of agency • Diminished ratings of agency during state boredom are a function of attentional disengagement
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".