An 1885 article in Nature entitled “The Measure of Fidget” is frequently referred to as the first scientific article on boredom. In the article, the author, Francis Galton, measures the regularity of bodies at a scientific lecture, claiming:
When the audience is intent, each person forgets his muscular weariness and skin discomfort and he holds himself rigidly in the best position for seeing and hearing. As this is practically identical for persons who sit side by side, their bodies are parallel and again, they sit at much the same distance apart. But when the audience is bored the several individuals cease to forget themselves and they begin to pay much attention to the discomforts attendant on sitting too long in the same position.
Galton goes on to try to measure the unknowing subjects’ variance from the original parallel posture, suggesting that the “measure of fidget,” the indication of boredom, would be the angle by which they disrupt the tidiness of the row. At this, he admits “for the present [I] have failed. I was, however, perfectly successful in respect to another sign of mutiny against constraint, inasmuch as I found myself able to estimate the frequency of fidget with much precision.” In other words, when the speaker is most boring (or when Galton thinks he is most boring,) the audience performs the most acts of fidgeting (or Galton notices the most acts of fidgeting,) causing Galton to make the claim that boredom, and boredom alone, causes fidgeting. The article ends with a call for a further study to give “numerical expression to the amount of boredom express” that is, to make multiple studies marking the “irregular” movement of people’s bodies, noting the angle from parallel as some sort of numerical boredom index.
This call was again taken up somewhat tongue-in-cheek in a 2008 study in the journal Medical Teacher called “Death by Power Point—The Need for a “Fidget Index,” which alludes directly to Galton’s study and closes with the suggestion that “perhaps we need to apply a ‘Fidget Index’ to monitoring Power Point Presentations.” A 2013 study on inattention out of the University of Waterloo, cites Galton’s study eleven times in ten pages as anecdotal evidence that “fidgeting behavior is related to inattention.” And most recently, cognitive scientists James Danckert and John Eastwood mention Galton’s article multiple times in their 2020 book Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom,** going so far as to write a passage that imagines themselves as bored members of the fidgeting audience.
These scientists need to stop. At first blush, "The Measure of Fidget” seems funny, cute even—a bored scientist passing the time by counting other scientists nodding off to sleep in a lecture hall. Galton may have even been writing tongue-in-cheek. But these contemporary articles use Galton’s article as an actual source! At best "The Measure of Fidget” is faulty logic—we have no proof that any of the audience (besides Galton) is bored. At worst, it’s a continuation of Galton’s disturbing eugenic taxonomy.
Many things are notable about Francis Galton. He was Charles Darwin’s cousin. He’s attributed with inventing the questionnaire, standard deviation, fingerprinting, weather forecasting and the phrase “nature vs. nurture.” He also, most sinisterly, is credited with inventing eugenics. I guess we might say that more than a century has passed since Galton was alive, that he did happen to be a racist monster who initiated a way of thinking that justified countless genocides, but that doesn’t discount his theories on boredom. But even if we were able to shelve the eugenics issue (I can’t), this simply isn’t true.
Galton liked taxonomies, especially when those classifications resulted in the groups of which he was a part being deemed superior to other groups. He often attributed results to his data that did not logically follow; in his book Hereditary Genius, for example, he noted that eminent individuals had eminent close relatives, but the more distant the relatives were, the less likely they were to be eminent, which he concluded proved genius was hereditary, failing completely to take cultural factors into account.
Compared to his work in eugenics and Social Darwinism, the boredom study seems relatively benign-- but the "Measure of Fidget" and his more sinister work are linked. Nobody should be taking this study seriously anymore. Especially in our era when attention is currency, to accuse people of acting bored (or not paying attention) is to accuse them of not being good citizens. Students accused of not paying attention (disproportionately students of color) are penalized in their “participation grade,” sent to detention and so on.
The fact is this: Galton’s desire to build a taxonomy with himself at the top shows in "The Measure of Fidget.” In fact, despite his supposed calculations, the only person we know for certain was bored during the lecture in which the study took place was Francis Galton. By his own admission, he was bored silly by the speaker, which is why he decided to undertake his study in the first place. While he did notice a great deal of fidgeting among the other audience members at the talk he attended, we don’t know that boredom was the cause.
There are a lot of reasons people fidget and look around: bodily pain, headache, flickering lights in the periphery, a crush on someone sitting across the room, urinary urgency, hunger, exhaustion, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or because fidgeting helps the subject focus, to name a few. There is no posture that proves the agent is paying attention, by the way—just postures that prove the agent knows how to perform attention. Likewise, there is no posture that always indicates boredom. We might suspect that the fidgeting was caused by boredom, but we don't know for sure. What we do know, though, is that their fidgeting distracted Galton from the speaker. It is quite possible he sat, as he had been trained to sit, perfectly straight, while he, bored, counted the uneven and noisy bodies, giving a number to what he perceived to be their boredom and none to his own.
So perhaps I should rephrase my call to action. Cite "The Measure of Fidget” all you want. But when you do, consider the politics: the politics of the time in which Galton wrote, yes, and the politics of Galton the eugenicist, yes but also the politics of Galton now. What does it mean today when I accuse someone of “looking bored?” Or when I start attributing causes that I do not understand to somebody else’s fidget? I barely talked about the classroom here, but this is about the classroom. Again, the only person we know was bored in “The Measure of Fidget was Galton—that's why he started measuring. When we start accusing students of being bored (or distracted, or not paying attention, or any one of a million terms for not participating correctly in the attention economy,) we might first look at our own attention, our own engagement.
** A brief caveat: While I disagree with the way the use Galton, I very much respect the work of James Danckert and John Eastwood and have followed them both for over a decade. Anyone interested in boredom should get to know their work!
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