Digital distractions are omnipresent. Notifications, emails, Twitter posts, YouTube recommendations, Google Ads: such technologies are designed to place historically unprecedented demands on attention. Whether these changes are for good or ill depends on two philosophical questions. One is descriptive: what kinds of mental activities do digital distractions generate? Another is normative: what kinds of mental activities contribute to a good life? Many argue that digital distractions are a problem because they undermine our capacity to pay attention. Yet digital technologies not only make us more distracted; they also change how we are distracted. Our minds used to wander during idly times like riding a bus or walking. Digital distractions instead leave us “stuck” on salient topics, such as moral outrage or doom-scrolling. This is a problem because spontaneous forms of attention like mind-wandering help us explore alternative points of view. Philosophical reflection on the mental good life bears not only on how we characterize the problem of digital distraction but also how we solve it. Current solutions often target the problem of inattention and thus offer strategies to make us more focused, productive, or deeper workers. These solutions may heighten attention. But they likely worsen the spontaneity deficit, leaving us even less time to wander.

The first complete work during my fellowship is a paper, which sketches part of the book's core argument. This is an early draft of the paper from Fall 2023. Email me if you want to see the latest version, which is in a constant state of flux.

Philosophers have recently become intrigued by norms of attention. How (if at all) can we appropriately evaluate whether someone is attending well or poorly? I argue that philosophers with disparate views implicit share a consensus about the normative problem that attention must solve. Attention norms must tell us how to limit attention, so that we attend to what is currently relevant and ignore what is currently irrelevant. In a slogan, attention norms are relevance norms. But relevance norms can become viciously circular, reinforcing mistaken assumptions about what is relevant. Neither subjective nor objective relevance norms can meet the Challenge of Circular Attention. I conclude that attention norms cannot just be relevance norms. Rather, I argue for the Balancing Norm of Attention: attentional agents should balance between (a) exploitative modes of attention that focus on what seems relevant in your current context and (b) exploratory modes of attention that allow you to not (completely) ignore what seems irrelevant. After developing this core argument, I fill in crucial philosophical details. I explain that “balancing” must be a context-sensitive and vague project. I contrast attention norms with traditional discussions of bounded rationality and the norms of belief and action.

How does character information inform judgments of blame? Some argue that character information is indirectly relevant to blame because it enriches judgments about the mental states of a wrongdoer. Others argue that character information is directly relevant to blame, even when character traits are causally irrelevant to the wrongdoing. We propose an empirical synthesis of these views: a Two Channel Model of blame. The model predicts that character information directly affects blame when this information is relevant to the wrongdoing that elicits blame. Further, the effect of character information on blame depends on judgments about the true self that are independent of judgments of intentionality. Across three pre-registered studies (N = 662), we found support for all three predictions of the Two Channel Model. We propose that this reflects two distinct functions of blame: a social regulatory function that encourages norm compliance and a pedagogical function that encourages personal improvement.

Attribution theorists widely assume that people rely on character assessments to assign blame. But there is disagreement over why. One camp holds that character has a fundamental effect on blame. Another camp holds that character merely provides evidence about the mental states and processes that determine responsibility. We argue for a two-channel view, where character simultaneously has both fundamental and evidential effects on blame. In two large factorial studies (n = 505), participants rate whether someone is blameworthy when he makes a mistake (burns a cake or misses a bus stop). Although mental state inferences predict blame judgments, character assessments do not. Studies 3 and 4 (n = 447) perform a mediation analysis and find that character assessments (about forgetfulness) influence responsibility via two channels, one direct and another indirect. Forgetfulness directly increases judgments of responsibility, presumably because one’s mistakes manifest bad character. But forgetfulness also decreases judgments of state control, which indirectly decreases responsibility judgments. These two channels cancel out, which is why we find no aggregate effect of forgetfulness on responsibility. Our results challenge several fundamental assumptions in the role of character in moral judgment, including that good character always decreases blame.

People often seem to generate creative ideas during moderately engaging activities, such as showering or walking. One explanation of this shower effect is that creative idea generation requires a balance between focused, linear thinking (which limits originality) and unbounded, random associations (which are rarely useful). Activities like walking may help us strike this balance by allowing mind wandering in an engaging environment that places some constraints on thought. Although past studies have found an inconsistent relationship between mind wandering and creative idea generation, they have two limitations. First, creativity researchers have not studied a key form of mind wandering, which is freely moving thought. Second, studies have used boring tasks that may encourage unconstrained and unproductive mind wandering. To overcome these limitations, we investigate the relationship between idea generation and freely moving mind wandering during boring versus engaging video tasks. Across two studies, we find that mind wandering leads to more creative ideas, but only during moderately engaging activities. Boring activities lead to either more ideas or more semantically distant ideas overall, but these effects were unrelated to mind wandering. Boring activities may therefore lead to ideas by affording time for focused problem solving, whereas engaging activities may do so by encouraging productive mind wandering. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ mental control, people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility.

Can we be responsible for our attention? Can attention be epistemically good or bad? Siegel tackles these under-explored questions in “Selection Effects”, a pathbreaking chapter of The Rationality of Perception. In this chapter, Siegel develops one of the first philosophical accounts of attention norms. Her account is inferential: patterns of attention are often controlled by inferences and therefore subject to rational epistemic norms that govern any other form of inference. Although Siegel’s account is explanatorily powerful, it cannot capture a core attention norm in cognitive science: one should balance between exploratory and exploitative attention. For central cases of exploratory attention such as mind-wandering, child-like, and creative thinking are non-inferential. Siegel’s view classifies them as “normative freebies” that are not subject to epistemic evaluation. We’re therefore left with a disjunctive conclusion: either Siegel’s inferentialist theory of attention norms is incomplete or cognitive scientists are wrong about the norms that govern attention.