What is the Cost of Paying Attention
When we pay attention to a single thing, the price is attention lost to something else. In other words, it’s like deleting people that you don’t connect with on Facebook, in order to connect better with people you like. However many of us aren’t minimalists, shaving the margins, and only paying attention to a small number of things we care deeply about.
Why do people sacrifice deeper relationships, by busying themselves with other things?
An immense amount of research posits that the human mind can only capture one thing consciously at a time. Multi-tasking erodes our focused attention. Just try to watch 2 Emmy-award winning movies at the same time. Especially when we are experiencing something that requires depth, concentration, and clarity, we humans choose to single out only what’s important.
That said, I think too many marketers and advertisers fall into the trap of placing and over-abundant importance to how great their product/service is — that they forget the millions of messages swaying and diminishing a potential customer’s attention. It’s not enough to simply get someones’ attention, and then feed them through marketing or sales funnel.
People are not a predictably linear math equation that can be rail-roaded into your service or product. Nor are we kernels in a brand’s pop-corn bucket, just waiting to hatch and be sold.
Consumers are sluts — that cheat on brands all the time. The only way to fully assure brand- loyalty is by allowing your customer to build a relationship with you; and in those relationships, foster a community.
Although there is a cost for paying attention, there’s a charge for alternating it. One of the most recognized social psychological researchers, and New York Times bestselling author, Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. points out that “for about a half-second during a shift of focus, we experience a mental dead spot, called an attentional blink when we can’t register newly highlighted information consciously.”
In fact, I’m sure you’ve experienced this phenomenon when conversing with a friend or someone you’re trying to connect with — and in return, they’re periodically looking at their phone, or taking their attention away from the conversation.
So if this happens to you, find those keywords that alert your subject, and quiet your voice gradually (as to get them to lean into you) — then kick their phone out of their hand (just kidding don’t do that). Instead, I think we as a society are going to have to learn how to become more compelling and choosy about who we spend our time with. Having thousands of friends of Facebook comes with a price tag.
How much do you pay attention to people who equally return that attention? And how much of a fair-weather social media connection are you?
According to the Nobel Prize Laureate of economics, and greatest and most profound psychologists of our time: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”
However, this goes without saying, because we humans fall into manipulation traps for our attention all the time — and without even knowing it. For instance, you can preempt an audience to focus in wrapt attention around your message, when you focus on delivering a cliff hanger — or key emotional element. The news does this every day. It’s what they use to set up the rhetoric to persuade and sway an audiences’ opinion.
As the political scent Bernard Cohen put’s it: “the press may not be successful most of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful about telling them what to think about.”
In fact, research by Engelberg, Sasseville, and Williams (2011), points out that financial options with short-term media coverage immediately spike in price, but then crash in value as that coverage peters out. All the more, there’s was a lot of survey research conducted, asking American citizens to elect, 2 weeks prior to 9/11, “two of the most important events” of the last 70 years. And as you might imagine, over 65 % of respondents replied that “9/11” was. However in subsequent years, the same questions were asked, and people responded in lower numbers.
Why do we focus more importance on what we are doing at the moment?
One answer is that whatever we are focusing on at the moment is usually very important in the time and space of a given circumstance. We give focused attention to the things that give weight to a particular instance. In other words, we place greater significance on the smell of burning in a closed building, or an unpredictable noise or image. Moreover, Rhesus monkeys will sacrifice food rewards, simply for the opportunity to interact with higher-status monkeys in their colony; and in the same instance, these monkeys will require that you give them a reward if you’re requiring them to pay attention to unimportant monkeys of lower status.
Many factors lead up to how we choose to focus our attention. In fact, many of us believe that what we focus on the most, is more important than other things that come our way. Someone that plays countless hours of a video game will think you’re a moron if you contradict or talk about contrary things. In other words, an auto mechanic, without a college education, might think an Ivy League graduate is slightly stupid because they don’t know how to perform a rudimentary maintenance task on their vehicle.
Focused attention to a subject builds our smarts in a particular way that gives us a healthy dose of dopamine and makes us feel self-important.
