Paying attention to attention: psychological realism and the attention economy

In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Aylsworth and Castro, In Journal of Applied Philosophy 38:662–673, 2021; Castro and Pham, In Philosophers’ Imprint 20:1–13, 2020; Williams, In Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy, Cambridge University Press, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but selfcontrol, and addiction as well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth and Castro, In Journal of Applied Philosophy 38:662–673, 2021; Bhargava and Velasquez, In Business Ethics Quarterly 31:321–359, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, In Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy, Cambridge University Press, 2018; Aylsworth and Castro, In Journal of Applied Philosophy 38:662–673, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, In Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy, Cambridge University Press, 2018). Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency.