It’s easy to get distracted by the urge to hit ‘share’. But most of us wouldn’t, if we gave it a moment’s thought
For a while now, I’ve been struggling to find words for a certain kind of mental state I keep experiencing, and of which I see signs in others. It’s not “being distracted”, but it’s not not “being distracted”, either. We tend to think of distraction as an all-or-nothing affair: either you’re concentrating successfully on something, or else you’ve been distracted by Twitter or Netflix yet again. But this is more like an erosion of attention, consistent with at least nominally remaining focused on the task at hand. (The label that comes closest is probably “continuous partial attention”, coined by the writer Linda Stone.) One key symptom is what I can only describe as an impatience with one’s own cognitive processes – an unwillingness to think your thoughts all the way through to the end. And I’m beginning to wonder if this bears some blame for the various predicaments we’re in.
My hunch was reinforced by a new study, which I discovered via Research Digest, about why people share fake news online. The two usual theories are that people who do so aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed (they believe the stories are true), or that they’re cynical jerks focused on slandering the opposition (they don’t care if they’re not true). But the Canadian psychologist Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues found evidence that most people prone to sharing fake news do think it’s important to share only true stories, and are capable of detecting fabricated ones. It’s just that they get distracted – by, among other things, the urge to share the story they’re reading – before they’ve had a proper chance to reflect on its veracity.
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