Education 2.0 & 3.0

Origins of the eight-second attention span myth

If you put them on the spot, most people will tell you that we know our attention span is less than goldfish because of research conducted by Microsoft in Canada in 2015. Those people are all wrong – but don't blame them. Countless respectable newspapers and magazines from The Daily Telegraph to TIME all reported that Microsoft had discovered that our attention span was now less than that of fish. They were all wrong too.

The Microsoft research certainly exists. It included impressive-sounding quantitative surveys and neurological studies – and the report does include an Infographic that shows human attention spans ‘dwindling’ from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2013, below the nine-second average attention span of a goldfish. The only problem is – that infographic wasn’t actually based on findings from Microsoft’s own research. It’s sourced to something called Statistics Brain. When you go to the Statistics Brain website, it offers a range of different sources for these and other stats. None of them seem to mention the attention spans of human beings or goldfish. When you look at it in any level of detail, the stat that has dominated a huge amount of marketing discussion since May 2015 isn’t based on any recognisable research at all. Jonathan Schwabish of the website policyviz conducted his own investigation (more in-depth than mine) and didn’t find anything either.

So the ‘fact’ that we have a lower attention span than goldfish isn’t a fact at all. But what do we actually know about what’s happening to our attention and what marketers should do about it? This is where the whole goldfish view of human attention starts to look even shakier.