Attention whore: Who’s paying attention to Trump?
A new study finds that people are paying more attention to the president-elect and his policies when they read the headlines, but that their attention to other subjects is also increasing.
A study published Tuesday in the journal Attention found that, in general, people are less attentive to news stories about the president when they are reading the headlines than when they aren’t.
“Our findings suggest that people’s attention to news events in general may be more influenced by headlines and the stories they read than the news itself,” study author Dr. Anjali Kumar, a psychology professor at Columbia University, wrote in a press release.
“The more news they read, the more they are interested in the president and his administration.
People may also pay more interest in stories about a political candidate’s policy proposals and his approval ratings.” “
For example, if the news story includes a headline like ‘The president was inaugurated, and we are in the process of removing him,’ people are more likely than not to pay attention to this headline.
People may also pay more interest in stories about a political candidate’s policy proposals and his approval ratings.”
The researchers analyzed news stories that were published between January 1, 2017, and June 29, 2017.
They found that people were less attentive when they were reading headlines that included the word “news” or the word, “newsy” than when there was no headline and the words “news,” “newsworthy,” “hot,” or “news story.”
People were also less attentive than they were when they weren’t reading headlines at all.
The study found that this was true for headlines that used “news in general” or “breaking news,” but it wasn’t true for “news of the day.”
The study also found that there was a positive correlation between people’s pay attention level and the headline they were watching.
The more attentive people were, the less they paid attention to stories about other topics.
“These results suggest that, as a general rule, people pay less attention to non-newsworthy news and newsy headlines,” Kumar said.
“But when news is important, people may pay more emphasis to headlines about their own political candidates and policies.”
It’s not clear whether this tendency to pay less mind to news headlines is driven by partisanship or because people are trying to read news more often than they would to a candidate’s policies.
It’s possible that the increased attention paid to news topics by the new president could actually make for more accurate news.
But this finding may not be a cause for concern, if it means that people actually pay more care and attention to what’s being said about the new administration than they do to their own politicians.
“In this case, the news is not really relevant,” Kumar told NBC News.
“So if you look at the data, it’s a bit surprising that people pay more time and attention, because that’s not really what you would call news in this context.”
The research was conducted by researchers at Columbia and the University of Washington.
It is available here.
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