Productivity and the crisis of attention

Dan Nixon from the BoE’s content and strategy division asks an important question this week regarding the connection between digital distraction and flailing productivity.

As he points out on the Bank’s Bank Underground blog, there’s a chance digital systems, rather than adding efficiency in weird and mysterious algorithmic ways, could be causing something of an attention crisis in modern society.

If that’s true — and we really are more distracted than ever — there could be important consequences for the economy in terms of the efficiencies drawn from division of labour in society and with respect to impact on general productivity.

Correlation ≠ causation obviously, but here’s a chart from Nixon which does offer some food for clicks:

Nixon’s hypothesis is simple.

He argues that distractions at work — whether from work emails, smartphone notifications or office noise — probably cause weaker productivity via two main channels.

The first is via the impact on effective time spent working. As Nixon notes:

The US Chamber of Commerce Foundation finds that people typically spend one hour of their workday on social media – rising to 1.8 hours for millennials. Another survey, meanwhile, found that traffic to shopping sites surged between 2pm to 6pm on weekday afternoons.

The total lost time will likely be greater than the time spent slacking off, however, since office workers typically take around 25 minutes to recover from interruptions before returning to their original task. What’s more, distractions can directly reduce the quality of our work . An influx of emails and phone calls, for example, is estimated to reduce workers’ IQ by 10 points – equivalent to losing a night’s sleep.

The second is via the cultivation of habitually distracted minds (a.k.a. people who have lost the ability to properly concentrate on any one particular task). As Nixon notes:

In the workplace, there’s some evidence that distractions cause more distractions. Mark (2015) finds that workers who get interrupted by external stimuli (eg message notifications) are significantly more likely to later go on to ‘self-interrupt’ – stop what they’re doing and switch to something else before reaching a break point. In other words, if you keep getting distracted by external stimuli, your mind’s more likely to wander off on its own accord.

Anecdotally, we originally spotted this piece from Nixon last week with the intention of writing it up immediately. Sadly, a slew of digital interruptions and general runs on our attention since then have meant it’s taken until now to get round to it!

With respect to the overall implications of all this, Nixon’s conclusion is pretty profound. He suggests the crisis of attention may eventually undermine the very algos which are being created to harvest our minds. Our emphasis:

… the more our attention is ‘captured’ by the algorithms that underpin consumer technologies, the less our decisions – what to click on, what to buy – can be said to reveal our true, underlying preferences. Of course, adverts have been around for a long time but the argument is that the use of Big Data to exploit psychological vulnerabilities in a targeted way, using the latest insights from neuroscience, changes the game: it prevents us from “wanting what we want to want”. This should concern economists because models of consumer behaviour rest largely on the assumption of ‘revealed preferences’.

Nixon also worries about the impact all this will have on our human capacity to show empathy, a skill which should become more valuable as heartless logic-oriented AIs increasingly take over.

Studies on mindfulness are instructive here: mindfulness practise gives explicit focus to cultivating attention, but research suggests that it also boosts individuals’ empathy – making it a potentially important part of a response to the impending wave of technological change.

If we humans can’t differentiate ourselves on that front, it does beg the question of whether technology is serving us, or if we are serving technology?

Nota bene: if you made it to the end of this post, congratulations. You receive a 1000 attention points.

Related links:
When a man cannot choose, is he still a consumer? – FT Alphaville