We’ve all been there. In an elevator, on a bus, or in a waiting room at the doctor’s office, you pull out your phone and start to scroll to stave off being bored.

But what if boredom didn’t have to be a negative thing, avoided at all costs? This summer, Siri Sandford ’25­—a psychology major with minors in sociology and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies—focused her Schapiro Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) on the relationship between boredom and creative thinking. While boredom is uncomfortable, Sandford explains that it’s also a great motivator.

“When you deal with boredom in an adaptive way and you experience mind wandering, it’s linked with a lot of problem solving, creative thinking, and goal-oriented thought,” Sandford said. “It’s a signal in your brain that pushes you to engage with things and seek out more productive and meaningful engagement.”

Sandford, mentored by Dr. Cedar Riener, specifically sought to test how the temptation of cell phone use affected the relationship between boredom and creative thinking. After exploring the research on the topic, she set up a study. For a baseline, the 25 participants filled out a boredom proneness test, then completed three creativity tasks, like the New York Times’ Game Spelling Bee.

The participants were then split into two groups (low- and high-temptation) and asked to sit in an empty room for 15 minutes with no personal belongings. The low-temptation group had no phone, while the high-temptation group was instructed to place their phone face down on the table in front of them in the room but to not interact with it.

After the 15 minutes, the participants retook the boredom proneness test and the creativity tasks. They also answered questions about their experience, including if they had thought about or used their phone. While there was no significant difference in the results between the two groups, a trend did emerge related to the participants’ behavior.

“People who thought of their phone more in the room rated higher in boredom,” Sandford explained. “That same positive correlation was found between daily cell phone use and boredom.”

“It’s always a tension in every psychology study, right? The difference between the individual characteristics people come into the study with versus what you do to them in the study,” Riener added.

The implication that increased cell phone usage could lead to proneness to boredom, and possibly a barrier to the kind of positive, creative thought that boredom produces, is an intriguing one. Sanford is eager to continue her project based on what she’s learned, with a bigger and broader sample of subjects and a new experiment design that corrects for limitations she found this summer. (Next time, she will ban smart watches too!) 

After earning her degree at Randolph-Macon, Sandford—who has also self-published two fantasy novels—aims to pursue a clinical psychology Ph.D. en route to becoming a therapist, a path that will benefit greatly from her undergraduate research experiences.

“I think it’s really important for students to see when they get into reading other literature in depth, like Siri has, that there’s not just one answer for most things, even about things that there seems to be public consensus,” Riener said. “It’s a really valuable experience to see the messiness of research, the complexity of it, but also the kind of deep thought that researchers do.”

Sandford has certainly thought deeply throughout this project. While reviewing literature, she reached out to a preeminent boredom researcher for a Zoom call to ask questions about his book. While a summer of SURF is over, the subject continues to inspire Sandford’s passion.

“I enjoy boredom research because I think it’s fascinating,” Sandford said. “But I think it’s also important to look at how cell phone use impacts how we think and how we behave, especially because it’s such a common thing that all of us carry around.”