Everyone gets bored from time to time. What do you do when you have these everyday feelings of boredom? In some cases, psychologists found that during such bouts, people sometimes watch porn, masturbate, or become preoccupied with thoughts about sex to deal with the adverse nature of boredom.
In this post, I describe how two core motives of human social behavior—the need for understanding and the need for control—shape people’s responses to disaster. Using the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 as an example, I describe how people seek to maintain meaning (related to understanding) and to re-establish certainty (related to control) after unforeseen disasters.
