Humans vs Goldfish: The Battle for Attention
Busting one of the most popular psychomyths of the 21st century
Have you been told that the human attention span is now 8 seconds, shorter than that of a goldfish? The internet and especially marketing companies have been inundated with exasperation at the “fact” that human beings can not hold attention for more than 8 seconds now. The culprit? Why social media of course.
“These damn social media people with their reels and their tweets and memes have ruined an entire generation!!”
Or so we are told.
But have you ever wondered, if the human attention span really is 8 seconds long…then how did you manage to make it to this point of the article?
Today’s story is about the most popular psycho-myth of the 2010s and a discussion on how and why it became so popular. Read on (if you have the attention span for it)
Microsoft Starts It Off
The ball started rolling when Microsoft Canada published a 52-page report titled, “Attention Spans | Customer Insights”
Right from the off, the report claimed that the human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds which was reduced to 8 seconds by 2015. To give you an idea of the terrible ordeal this was, it also mentioned that the attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds.
In the corner, the report mentioned Statistic Brain as its source for this data.
Let’s look into Statistic Brain and where they got this info from.
The Statistic Brain Research Institute
The SBRI was founded in 2004 and claims to use statistics to bring people closer together to a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us. It has a dedicated section for “attention span statistics” where the data cited by Microsoft can be found.
But this is where it gets murky.
The institute reports that it collected this data using online/direct mail responses. This raises two problems
Email/direct mail responses cannot be used to measure timed responses. They collect answers to questions, not how long it takes you to answer them,
and most importantly,
Goldfish cannot respond to either direct or online mail
When probed about these inconsistencies, SBRI shared no comments. They ghosted :(
Moreover, there are inconsistencies in SBRI’s own data. Some pages claim the unit of time measured in minutes. So, the attention span is actually 8 minutes, not 8 seconds but again, very little info on how this was measured.
If that wasn’t enough, there is evidence that suggests that SBRI is an attempt at crypto jacking - a move where visitors’ computers are infected with malware to mine cryptocurrencies.
Despite the rather shaky grounds on which it is based, the idea that humans have an ever-shrinking attention span is hugely popular among laypeople.
Why Did We Fall For It?
More than debunking the myth I want to talk about what made this myth so popular. I think the reason is simple. Somewhere, we wanted to believe it.
Humans have a declinism bias. It is the idea that the people and society at large are constantly declining or degrading. This myth was perfect to reinforce the bias.
It was easy to consume, it was alarming and it lay the blame for this decline on unchecked advances in technology and social media. A simple lie that confirms our biases is easier to believe and spread than actually taking a step back and analyzing the truth.
Who Wins The Attention War?
The internet loves putting humans up against goldfish when it comes to wars over attention spans and intelligence. Who really wins in these?
No one. Well, no one, except marketing companies trying to sell you courses to “capture the attention of the customer in 8 seconds!!!”
In fact, there is evidence that goldfish are smarter than we thought!
How about we all just get along? Humans are pretty smart. Goldfish are…smart. And we both hate lies being spread as facts.
And that is it for this week! Be honest, you fell for this myth too didn’t you? It happens. We are human. We cannot always be digging deep searching for the truth.
What other myth/dodgy claim would you like fact-checked? You can let me know by responding to the mail or in the comments below!
Until next time,
Arjun
Excellent piece of writing. This is the first article I have read, and I'm in awe of how subtly savage it is.
Very informative article, I had no idea goldfish were so photogenic.