About the project
Much public discussion about social media, public health, and political debates focuses on what deserves our attention, and how we should regulate our attention in the face of distraction.
What is missing is a philosophical investigation of attention norms and a framework for thinking about them. This is what the project "Attention norms and their role in practical reason, epistemology, and ethics" (GoodAttention) provides.
Goal
GoodAttention looks into normative questions about attention: what are appropriate, correct, or rational patterns of attention. This is then connected to how attention actually works: both in an individual and in groups and societies.
For an overview of our ongoing research see here
Approach
GoodAttention integrates research in psychology, neuroscience and linguistics with the philosophical fields of decision theory, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. It investigates the cognitive and social mechanisms of norm-guided attention. And it integrates attention into normative philosophy.
Contemporary societies face challenges in organizing and sharing information, in mental health, collective action, and new media landscapes. GoodAttention studies normative questions about attention in this context. This study will help to develop principles that can guide legal scholars and policymakers.
We aim to establish the study of attention norms as a field and organize events to bring researchers around the world together. We do foundational research in five different subprojects. And we engage the public in the media and in outreach activities.
Hypothesis
Our central hypothesis is that there are substantial and irreducible attention norms. The "Ethics of Attention" can be a rich philosophical field that intersects with and informs debates in moral philosophy, the theory of rationality, and epistemology. The investigation of attention norms can help integrate research in evolutionary biology, cognitive and social psychology, linguistics, sociology, economics, and political theory.
Framework
Part of our work uses the priority structure framework developed in Sebastian Watzl's "Structuring Mind." With this framework, we can study how attention norms emerge within our individual psychology and in the social domain. We can also evaluate attention norms by subjecting them to philosophical scrutiny and by integrating them into normative philosophy.
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