TikTok made me look up a stat that blew my mind...

So I saw this video where a guy claimed the average attention span dropped to like 8 seconds now. I figured he was just making stuff up for views, but I actually looked it up and found a study from some university that said it really did go down from 12 seconds back in 2000. That's a full 4 seconds gone in just over 20 years. Has anyone else fact checked one of those random stats they throw around and found out it was actually true?

2 comments

2 Comments

danielm801d agoTop Commenter

Bro, I literally can't even finish a YouTube video these days without getting distracted by a notification, so when I heard that 8 second stat I was like "yeah that tracks for me." But then I read that marketing report thing too and realized I probably just have the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel because of my phone habits, not because my brain is literally shrinking. I mean I can still binge an entire Netflix series in one weekend if the show is good enough, so maybe my attention isn't totally dead. Still though, kinda funny that I spent 10 minutes googling whether my attention span is actually 8 seconds or not. Irony at its finest.

noahgreen1d ago

I read that same study from the University of California and something felt off about it. The 8 second figure they cite actually comes from a marketing report, not a peer reviewed psychology paper. That study measures how long people look at a screen before scrolling, which is totally different than actually paying attention to something in real life. I can sit through a 3 hour movie just fine and I see people reading long articles every day. Maybe we just scroll faster now because apps are designed to be addictive, not because our brains are actually broken. The whole thing seems like another way to make people feel bad about using their phones.