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Attention & Ethics

What is attention? Are there good and bad ways of paying attention?

What is Attention?

To understand the ethical issues that arise about attention in the digital world, we first need to ask: what are we talking about? What is attention? As the American philosopher and psychologist (and one of the co-founders of modern psychology) William James famously said:

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Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in a clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought [1, p.404].

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However, while James suggested that everyone knows what attention is, there is actually a lot of disagreement among those who study it about what exactly it is and what it does [2, 3, i].  We can nevertheless highlight some key features of attention that have been identified by those who study it as especially relevant to ethical questions about attention and new digital technologies. Consider the following scenario.

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You are at a busy café. The people at the table next to you are talking about yesterday’s football match; the couple across from you are having an argument; at the cash register, someone is placing an order; behind the bar, the barista is making coffee; outside, someone at the bus stop is having a loud conversation on the phone. It would not be possible to take in everything that is happening around you all at once. Attention makes it possible to select some of that information and leave the rest behind [2,4]. Attention is the mind’s ability to prioritize information, enabling you to focus on the book you are reading rather than on the quarreling couple across from you [5,6].

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Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

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As you read the description of the busy café, you were probably able to imagine what it is like to shift your attention from one thing to the next, and how shifting your attention changes your overall experience. Imagine that you are in that café, reading this text. Now focus your attention on the sound of the espresso machine. This changes your experience. Imagine now that the server drops a tray of dishes. The sound of the shattering porcelain will draw your attention away from the espresso machine and to the scene involving the flustered server sweeping up the mess. Now imagine that someone pulls the fire alarm. This will grab everyone’s attention in that café, and a bring a collective focus to the sound of the alarm.

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Features of Attention

The café scene brings out some important features of attention:

 

First, attention has a subjective quality and shapes how you experience the world[3, ii]. What this means is that it feels like something to focus your attention on something, and to shift your attention from one thing to another. There is, for example, something that it feels like to you to focus your attention on the sound of the espresso machine, and there is something that it feels like to you to focus your attention on reading your book. When you focus your attention on the sound of the espresso machine, your experience of the world is different than when you focus your attention on reading your book.

 

Another example might help to clarify this point. Suppose you are listening to some music. Imagine that you turn your attention to the sound of the piano. Now imagine shifting your attention to the sound of the guitar. These shifts in attention will shape how you experience the music. Depending on what you are focusing on, different elements of the music will be emphasized in your experience. And as it goes with music, so it goes for other experiences, in the café and beyond.

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Second, attention is controllable [4, 5]. You can control (to some extent) whether you focus on the sound of the espresso machine or on the book page in front of you (or on the piano or guitar). Attention is also (to some extent) controllable by others. The person who pulls the fire alarm, for example, can control the attention of everyone in the café. Notice that control over attention is different from control over other mental states or processes like belief. While you can control whether you pay attention to the barista making coffee, you cannot in the same way control whether to believe there is an elephant in the room.

 

Third, attention is a limited capacity [5]. You cannot focus your attention on everything all at once. When you focus your attention on one thing you take your attention away from something else. By focusing your attention on the fire alarm, for example, you are unable to focus on your book.

 

Finally, it is important to note that attention shapes us: it can shape what we care about [7], what we believe [8], what we remember [9], and ultimately how we act [10].

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Suppose that every time you go to the café you sit in the same window seat, from which you can see a billboard advertisement for aviator sunglasses. Despite how hard you try, you cannot avoid paying some attention to this advertisement (it’s even harder to ignore when it’s a moving image [11]). And despite also how little you initially care about sunglasses, you remember the ad when you are out with your friends, you start to imagine yourself looking cool wearing those sunglasses, and you eventually come to want a pair. Next time you’re at the shopping center, you pick some up. In this case, the advertisement does exactly what it is supposed to do: to influence your consumer behaviour. It shapes your desire for, and ultimate purchase of, aviator sunglasses.


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Photo by Andrae Ricketts on Unsplash

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Consider another example. One of your friends on Facebook shares an article that claims that vaccines cause autism. You do not believe this, but out of curiosity, you click on the link and read the article.  The next day you log on, there is another article that also claims there to be a connection between vaccination and autism.  And the next day, another. Eventually, a lot of your Facebook feed is filled with articles of this nature. The connection between vaccines and autism starts to seem plausible to you.  And eventually, you come to believe that vaccines cause autism, and as a result, you skip getting your next COVID booster shot.

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Attention is a Gateway to the Mind

The advertisement in the first case was able to change your desires – what you wanted. The articles on Facebook in the second case were able to change what you believed. If you had been able to look away from the advertisement or ignore the articles on your Facebook feed, they would not have had the same effect on you [12-14]. But they instead grabbed your attention and ultimately affected what you wanted and what you believed. In this way, attention can be thought of as a gateway to our desires and beliefs. And since what we want and what we believe affect how we act (for example, by buying sunglasses or avoiding getting a vaccine), attention can be used as a powerful tool to influence behaviour.
 

People in a busy coffee shop
Billboard advertisements in busy intersection

Reflection Exercises

  1. ​How much control do think you have over what you pay attention to? Come up with 2-3 examples where what you pay attention to is is clearly under your control, and 2-3 examples where what you pay attention to is out of your control.
     

  2. How much influence do you think what you pay attention to has over what you believe and desire? Support your view with examples.
     

  3. Do you agree that what you pay attention to has a strong influence on your behaviour? Why or why not?
     

  4. Should others be allowed to influence what we pay attention to? Why or why not?
     

The Ethics of Attention

Climate protesters carrying signs.

Photo by Li-An Lim on Unsplash

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In the last section we looked at what attention is. This is a descriptive question—one about the role that attention plays in human cognition. As we have seen, we have some control over what we pay attention to. As a result, we face choices about what we should pay attention to, or what deserves our attention [15]. Should we pay attention to the cute cat videos on Tiktok, or should we instead pay attention to the climate crisis? These are ethical questions, or questions of value.

 

Suppose that Charly pays a lot of attention to TikTok, where they spend much of their time watching cat videos. Oliver, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to the climate crisis. Is Charly doing something morally wrong and Oliver something right by focusing their attention as they do? Do we think that the climate crisis is more deserving of attention than cat videos on TikTok are?

 

To help us answer these questions, we can draw on normative ethical theory. In philosophy, normative ethics is concerned with what makes actions right and wrong and can help us to determine how we are, morally, to act. One broad distinction between normative ethical theories is between consequentialism and deontology. 
 

Consequentialism

Consequentialists hold that the rightness or wrongness of actions lies solely in the consequences of those actions [16]. According to consequentialism, morally correct actions are those actions that result in better consequences than their alternatives.

 

But what kind of consequences are we talking about? That depends on what kind of consequentialist one is. Utilitarianism is probably the best-known type of consequentialist moral theory [17-20].  For the utilitarian, happiness is the only thing that is intrinsically good, or what matters for its own sake.[21] (Compare this to money, which is instrumentally valuable—that is, valuable not for its own sake but for what it can buy us.) Roughly, utilitarians think that actions are morally good when they maximize happiness for everyone impartially considered. “Impartially considered” means that everyone’s happiness is to count for the same.  My own happiness or the happiness of my friends and family, for example, does not matter more than the happiness of strangers, or of people halfway around the world. Everyone is to count for one and none for more than one.

 

Let us take a simple example. Suppose that I have some extra money to spend. I can spend this money on another new pair of jeans (which I do not need) or I can donate it to a charity, which will use that money to help provide food to those who need it. While buying a new pair of jeans will make me happy, donating the money to the charity clearly will maximize the happiness for a greater number of people, impartially considered. In this case, according to the utilitarian, I am therefore morally obligated to donate the money, and it would be wrong for me to instead buy a new pair of jeans.

 

To return to our example about Charly and Oliver, let us suppose that what they each pay attention to influences how they act. Oliver’s attention on the climate crisis causes him to create a student group that organizes climate protests. Charly’s attention to cat videos on TikTok, on the other hand, prevents them from watching the news or otherwise engaging in important social issues. In this case, since Oliver’s attention on the climate crisis results in actions that have better consequences than other actions (e.g., sitting at home and watching cat videos), then, according to the utilitarian, Oliver’s choice to pay attention to the climate crisis is morally correct and Charly’s choice to watch cat videos is morally wrong.

 

Let’s consider another case. Suppose again that Oliver pays a lot of attention to the climate crisis. But let’s suppose that this causes him to have a lot of climate anxiety and is unable to act. He sits in his room all day and worries about climate change, but is unable to do anything about it. In this case, according to utilitarianism, it would be better for him not to pay attention to the climate crisis. Indeed, it would be morally wrong for him to do so, because of the bad consequences of his doing so.

 

Deontology

Another moral theory we can make use of to evaluate Charly’s focus of attention is deontology. Unlike consequentialists, deontologists think that actions are not made right or wrong only by their good or bad consequences.  

 

Suppose that you could develop a drug that would save the lives of millions of people but only by performing dangerous and painful experiments on a small handful of people without their consent. For the utilitarian, since the drug would provide great benefit to large number of people, it would be morally obligatory to develop it—and thus to perform the dangerous and painful experiments on the handful of people.

 

Many deontologists, by contrast, would think that these experiments are wrong, always, regardless of the good consequences that they produce.  Most think instead that we have strict duties—or rules—that must be followed [22].18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, thought that we should act in ways that are “universalizable”—that is, act in ways that we would want everyone else to act [23, p.20; 24]. To illustrate this, consider again the earlier example of how to spend your extra money. When you are deciding whether it would be morally wrong to buy a new pair of jeans instead of donating the money to charity, you can ask yourself: “What if everyone did this?” If you would not want it if everyone did what you are about to do, then you are not morally allowed to do it.

 

We can test now whether it would be morally wrong to buy a pair of jeans in the above example. If everyone bought a pair of jeans instead of donating money to charity, then charity organizations would never get the money they needed to help other people. Would you want that? What if you ever found yourself in need of help from a charitable organization? Most of us would agree that we would not want everyone to buy a pair of jeans instead of donating to charity. And if so, it would then be wrong for to do so.

 

Let’s return to the example of Charly. What if everyone only paid attention to cat videos? Would we want that? Again, most of us would likely agree that this would not be something we would want. If everyone cared only about cat videos, all other important social and political matters like the climate crisis would be ignored. Deontologists like Kant may therefore say it is wrong for Charly to only pay attention to cat videos.

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Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is a third major approach to normative ethics that we can consider. While consequentialism and deontology are chiefly concerned with what principles or rules we should follow, virtue ethics emphasizes moral virtue or character. Unlike deontology and utilitarianism, virtue ethics does not aim to reduce morality to a simple formula. Instead of asking “What principles should I follow?”, the virtue ethicist asks: “What would the virtuous person do?”

 

According to ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle [25], virtues are character traits that are good for anyone to have; they are essential for a person to achieve a state referred to in Greek as “eudaemonia,” or a state of happiness or flourishing.  Examples of virtues include courage, kindness, generosity, and modesty. Aristotle described virtues as means between extremes. Courage, for example, is a character trait midway between cowardice and foolhardiness.

 

According to Aristotle, the virtuous person becomes virtuous through habituation. In other words, one needs to practice being virtuous. Once virtue becomes habit, an individual will be able to display virtue (or act virtuously) in a range of different circumstances. In the face of adversity, the virtuous person will exhibit courage; when faced with someone in need, they will display generosity and kindness. The virtuous person need not consult a set of rules before acting morally; they simply do so out of habit.

 

In recent years, some philosophers have drawn connections between attention and virtue ethics. On some accounts, there are ways of attending virtuously [26]. One might suggest, for example, that person who pays attention to the right things, in the right way, for the right amount of time displays virtue in the way they attend. Compare this to someone who pays attention to the wrong things or who attends to something for longer than they should. Someone who focuses too much attention on a job candidate’s appearance, for example, fails to pay attention virtuously. (Of course, we might still here ask what the right thing to pay attention to is, or how much time we should be spending paying attention to it! This is a common criticism of virtue ethics in general—namely that it does not specify exactly how we should act to act virtuously [27].)

 

On other accounts, virtue requires that individuals pay attention in certain ways. In order to exhibit the virtue of modesty, for example, one needs to pay attention in certain kinds of ways [28]. In particular, one should not focus too much attention on one’s strengths and skills. If Matilda focuses too much attention on her superior skills as a driver, for example, she fails to exhibit modesty.

 

Returning to our example of Charly and Tik Tok videos, instead of asking whether it is wrong that Charly pays so much attention to watching cat videos on Tik Tok, the virtue ethicist will ask how the virtuous person would pay attention. But what this means in terms of whether Charly should pay attention to cat videos – and, if so, how much they should pay attention to cat videos—is not entirely clear.

 

One might suggest that finding a mean between extremes would entail that an individual sometimes pursue what is politically important and sometimes engage in personal pursuits. If so, it may be permissible for Charly to spend some of their time watching cat videos on Tik Tok (and some of their time attending to more socially important matters).

Reflection Exercises

  1. We might think that we can morally blame people for their actions only when they have control over them. How much control do you think we have over what we pay attention to?  If Charly was forced to watch cat videos, would you think that their doing so was morally wrong? What if everytime they opened their phone there was a cat video playing, making it very difficult for Charly not to pay attention to cat videos?
     

  2. In the analysis above, both utilitarians and deontologists would say that it wrong to watch cat videos. Is there a way for either to hold the opposite view? How could a utilitarian or deontologist defend watching cat videos on TikTok?
     

  3. Do you think that virtue ethics can guide action, or tell us how we morally should act? What do you think are virtuous ways of paying attention? Can this help us determine what we should be paying attention to?
     

  4. How does what you pay attention to affect the kind of person that you are? What you care about? How you act?
     

  5. What do you think makes something deserving of our attention? Do you think that we are morally obligated to pay attention to some things and not others? Why or why not? If so, what are some things that we should pay attention to? What are some things that we should avoid paying attention to? Give reasons for your view.
     

References

[1] James, W. (1981 [1890]). The principles of psychology. Harvard University Press.

 

[2] Mole, C. (2021). “Attention.” In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelmen (eds.,) , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (winter 2021 edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/attention/.  

 

[3] Watzl, S. (2023). What attention is. The priority structure account. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 14(1), e1632. https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcs.1632.

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[4] Wu, W. (2014). Attention. Routledge.

 

[5] Watzl, S. (2017). Structuring mind: The nature of attention and how it shapes consciousness. Oxford University Press.  
 

[6] Jennings, C. D. (2020). The attending mind. Cambridge University Press.

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[7] Dietrich, F., & List, C. (2013). Where do preferences come from?. International Journal of Game Theory, 42, 613-637.
 

[8] Mandelbaum, E. (2014). Thinking is believing. Inquiry, 57(1), 55-96


[9] Chun, M. M., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2007). Interactions between attention and memory. Current opinion in neurobiology, 17(2), 177-184.


[10] Orquin, J. L., & Loose, S. M. (2013). Attention and choice: A review on eye movements in decision making. Acta psychologica, 144(1), 190-206.


[11] Nes, A. and Watzl, S. (2022, July 18). ”Riv ned reklameskjermene.” Dagbladet. https://www.dagbladet.no/meninger/riv-ned-reklameskjermene/76664949.


[12] MacKenzie, S. B. (1986). The role of attention in mediating the effect of advertising on attribute importance. Journal of Consumer Research, 13(2), 174-195.


[13] Santoso, I., Wright, M., Trinh, G., & Avis, M. (2020). Is digital advertising effective under conditions of low attention?. Journal of Marketing Management, 36(17-18), 1707-1730.


[14] Wikipedia contributors. (2023, October 25). Mere-exposure effect. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:15, October 27, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mere-exposure_effect&oldid=1181801429


[15] Watzl, S. (2022). The ethics of attention: An argument and a framework. In S. Archer, (ed.), Salience: A philosophical inquiry, (pp.89-112). Routledge.


[16] Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2003). "Consequentialism."  In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelmen (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (winter 2023 edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/.


[17] Driver, J. (2022). "The History of Utilitarianism", In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelmen (eds.) , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (winter 2022 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/utilitarianism-history/.

 

[18] Bentham, J. (1890). Utilitarianism. Progressive Publishing Company.
 

[19] Mill, J.S. (1863) Utilitarianism. London: Parker, Son, and Bourn.
 

[20] Sidgwick, H. (1981 [1874]) Methods of Ethics (7th edition). Hackett Publishing Company.
 

[21] Zimmerman, M. J. and Bradley, B. "Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value.", In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelmen (eds.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/.
 

[22] Alexander, L. and Moore, M. (2021). “Deontological Ethics.” In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelmen (eds.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/ethics-deontological/.


[23] Kant, I. (1993 [1785]). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (J.W. Ellington, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
 

[24] Johnson, R. and Cureton, A. "Kant’s Moral Philosophy", In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelmen (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/kant-moral/.

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[25] Crisp, R. (Ed.). (2014). Aristotle: nicomachean ethics. Cambridge University Press.

 

[26] Gardiner, G. (2022). Attunement: On the cognitive virtues of attention. In M. Alfano, C. Klein, & J. de Ridder, J. (Eds.). Social virtue epistemology. Taylor & Francis.

 

[27] Bommarito, N. (2013). Modesty as a Virtue of Attention. Philosophical Review, 122(1), 93-117.

 

[28] Hursthouse, Rosalind and Glen Pettigrove, "Virtue Ethics." In Edward N. Zalta (ed.,), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Fall 2023 edition).  = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/ethics-virtue/.

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Notes

[i] For an overview, see Mole 2021 [2]. The presentation here has been especially influenced by Watzl 2023 [3].

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[ii] This aspect of attention is especially emphasised by Watzl (2017) [5]  By ‘experience’ we mean subjective consciousness. 

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