Episode 17: Your shrinking attention span

The thesis of Johann Hari’s bestselling 2022 book Stolen Focus is that tech companies—via the internet, smartphones, and social media—are wrecking our attention spans. Hari argues that Facebook, Apple, and all the rest, in their deliberate attack on our ability to concentrate, are doing huge damage to the human species.

In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart (whose microphone sounds a bit odd this week - sorry about that!) discuss the data on whether people’s attention spans are getting shorter, ask whether there’s evidence people are too distracted to finish tasks—such as writing podcast descriptions—that they’ve started, and

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Show notes

* Pre-order Pete Etchells’s book Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better)

* Johann Hari’s 2022 Guardian article on attention spans

* Stuart’s review of Stolen Focus, including some background on Hari’s “interesting” journalistic career

* “You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish”, apparently

* Just watch this video. No spoilers.

* The lizardman’s constant is 4%

* 2009 PNAS study on multitasking

* 2021 Cyberpsychology meta-analysis on cognitive control and multitasking

* 50% of people think tech is ruining people’s attention spans

* Satirical study from 2020 on the addiction to “spending time with friends”

* One of Matthew Sweet’s Twitter investigations of Johann Hari’s references

* Stuart’s look at some of the other studies cited in the book

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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