Short summary of some reading on attention spans (maybe a longer writeup at some point):
As far as I can tell, psychology doesn’t have a agreed-upon measure of attention span, nor does it have a standard test for measuring it. Papers on the topic try to answer more specific questions, such as “what is the attention span of students during lectures”, where there is also no consensus (could be 8 seconds, could be 10 minutes, could be more). In the best case, papers use ad-hoc tests to measure attention span, in the worst case the use surveys. A commonly reported decline of attention span from 8 seconds to 12 seconds is likely completely fabricated. Since we don’t even have a test for attention span, society is not tracking whether attention spans are declining.
This seems like an improvable state of affairs, and could probably result in a lot of citations for comparatively little effort (look at some of the ad-hoc tests used in different papers, try them for construct, let a random sample take the test, and let another random sample take the test a year or two later (if desired, repeat)). The fact that completely made-up figures are cited this widely indicates that there is interest in those numbers.
Short summary of some reading on attention spans (maybe a longer writeup at some point):
As far as I can tell, psychology doesn’t have a agreed-upon measure of attention span, nor does it have a standard test for measuring it. Papers on the topic try to answer more specific questions, such as “what is the attention span of students during lectures”, where there is also no consensus (could be 8 seconds, could be 10 minutes, could be more). In the best case, papers use ad-hoc tests to measure attention span, in the worst case the use surveys. A commonly reported decline of attention span from 8 seconds to 12 seconds is likely completely fabricated. Since we don’t even have a test for attention span, society is not tracking whether attention spans are declining.
This seems like an improvable state of affairs, and could probably result in a lot of citations for comparatively little effort (look at some of the ad-hoc tests used in different papers, try them for construct, let a random sample take the test, and let another random sample take the test a year or two later (if desired, repeat)). The fact that completely made-up figures are cited this widely indicates that there is interest in those numbers.