Making Room in Our Attention Spans for Social Good

There are lots of ways to take action on social media to "do good" — but most of us don't have the attention span to do so.

Matt Wallaert, a behavioral scientist at Bing and founder of GetRaised.com, said in a speech at Mashable's Social Good Summit in New York on Sunday that our attention levels are due for an adjustment.

"Humankind, generally, is going up and to the right. Infant mortality is down, we're living much longer," he said to the audience. "But there's one resource we haven't been able to find more of: attention. Our cognitive capacity is roughly the same as it's always been."

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Wallaert referenced the millions of apps available in the App Store. The number keeps increasing, but the number of user downloads has plateaued — the mental maximum of apps has been reached and, in a way, so has our attention.

But there's a way to subconsciously help: If there's a bowl of M&Ms on a table in front of you, he said, it's easy to snack away. If you melt the bowl's contents and pour vinegar over it, though, it becomes less desirable (to most people, at least.) The same principle can be applied to help us "pressure" ourselves to perform in other ways — i.e. take advantage of, and prioritize, the digital tools at our fingertips.

"The youth of the world are excited to take action — but we do that at a very basic level," he said. "The 'promoting' pressures, I call them, are there. Our job is simply to apply the inhibiting pressures. That's how we'll get people to take action."

One technology initiative Wallaert noted, which is helping do good, is a women's empowerment website. GetRaised.com is a platform to help women get raises at their jobs. Interested users fill out basic information about themselves, then receive a Raise Request to bring to their bosses. According to Wallaert, 65% of women who take the request to their managers receive raises. The average amount: $6,500.

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