Attention Arms Race: Ad Version

Are you finding ads on your Internet browser more and more annoying? There’s a reason for that. Compared to the more passive nature of watching television, we interact more actively and purposefully with the Internet. To get your attention, advertisers need to work harder by hammering you with annoying, pop-up, highly animated, distractions.

How do we function in an information-overloaded age? And how do advertisers engage in an arms race for your attention? Insight into this and much more can be found in Sold on Language by Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, both experts in linguistics and cognitive science. Their book is subtitled “How Advertisers Talk to You & What This Says About You”. The book cover looks commercial, and you have to work a little harder to see that the publisher is Wiley-Blackwell. This is an academic book, chock full of information, but very well written – to keep your attention focused. (I recommend it!) In today’s post I will just focus on Chapter 3 – The Attentional Arms Race

With information being hammered at you from the moment you wake up, why aren’t you completely exhausted? I like the way the authors frame their response: “The answer is one that junior high teachers have known all along: that people ignore most of the information that surrounds them. Or rather, they shunt most of it off to the periphery of their attention, allowing only a small, select portion of it a full audience with the attentive part of their minds. Selective hearing and seeing is not just a fact about adolescent contrariness; it’s a systematic human trait.”

I learned that mental attention and vision work similarly. When you survey a scene, you think you are carefully taking in all that you see. But actually, your detailed vision only covers a very small spatial area (“about the size of your thumbnail held at arm’s length in front of you”). What happens is that your brain interprets the scene as your “your eyes jump around from one spot to another every fraction of a second to take visual snapshots”. These snapshots are assembled by your neurons giving you the impression of “a coherent scene by means of a perceptual miracle.” (The authors provide excellent examples and references to support their argument.)

So if you can only carefully attend to a tiny slice of what you see and hear, how do advertisers try to grab you? By providing something unexpected. Our brains are evolutionarily wired to react to unexpectedness perceptually. Advertisers exploit this approach. The TV strategy is to “make sure the first seconds of commercials are extra loud, extra flashy and with lots of extra movement compared to the TV program they’re nested in, or novel and unexpected enough [to] nab your attention.” Internet ads have to fight even harder to do this because part of your attention is already devoted to your browsing activity. That’s why we “experience these as annoying precisely because we have to wrestle with them to regain control over our attentional resources… [The ads] act as dead weights on our cognitive processes… making us feel as if we’re expending more mental effort, which we are.”

Sold on Language focuses mainly on advertising, but there are several examples of how deliberate linguistic choices (accompanied by appropriate visuals) can be effective in political messaging. Sedivy and Carlson uncover the many tricks that are used, and analyze why they are effective – at least for a period of time, until the dynamic arms race results in a blasé response to the old tricks, thereby requiring newer tricks. Not all these are loud and brash. Many are subtle, and perhaps all the more effective because of their covertness. There’s a reason why branding is a multi-billion dollar industry. This includes political branding. Much more can be said on this topic, but instead of commercial advertising and politics, I would like to turn my attention to education for the remainder of this post.

You’ve heard the old-fogey complaints about kids these days being more easily distracted and having shorter attention spans. Technology and the Internet are chiefly blamed. TV was blamed in an earlier generation. Books were blamed many generations ago. But perhaps the main problem is not so much the medium per se, but the arms race for attention. The Internet simply provides a much larger audience at lightning speeds. What happens when more blinking lights and rowdy animations fight for your attention?

First, let’s discuss two types of thinking. Both have developed in humans evolutionarily for different purposes. They complement each other in many cases, but sometimes come to conflicting conclusions. Deep thinking (System 2) is the slower, analytical approach, which one needs for, say, learning chemistry in school. It requires huge resources for our brain, but the concentration can be well rewarded if focused appropriately. Peripheral thinking (System 1), on the other hand, is quick and intuitive. It allows us to quickly filter out the numbing deluge of sensory information, so we can attend to something that might be life-saving at a moment’s notice. Serious analysis is not part of its repertoire.

Here’s where the attention arms race makes things harder for educators. The authors write: “Today, the thick information soup we swim around almost guarantees that we’ll do proportionally more peripheral thinking… [It] rewards persuasive messages that use superficial cues, many of which we’re not even consciously aware of. Messages that focus on building a decent argument and presenting solid evidence are at a competitive disadvantage in this environment.” Truthiness tends to be more convincing than truth when your attention is being bombarded because you’re inclined to process more peripherally.

There are two approaches an educator can use that are not mutually exclusive. One, reduce the distractions. I don’t have a no cellphone or laptop rule, simply because this has generally not been a problem in my smaller-sized classes. (At my institution, the large introductory courses cap at 40 students – so we have to run multiple sections for a core class.) Two, provide something that grabs the student’s attention and motivates them towards deep thinking. This is not easy, because the deep thinking required in learning chemistry is quite difficult and non-intuitive, and (excuse my pun) the activation energy barrier is rather high. But there is a potential reward: a cognitive “learner’s high” akin to the “runner’s high”. Tailoring in these experiences at appropriate time intervals can provide a sufficiently motivating factor. One thing we’re seeing in the advertising world is that people enjoy puzzles – not too hard, not too easy. That’s the challenge of the educator, and a topic I hope to explore more as I think about revamping my introductory chemistry class in the fall semester.