Why do we focus more on some things than others?

Attentional Bias

, explained.
Bias

What is Attentional Bias?

The attentional bias describes our tendency to focus on certain elements of our environment while ignoring others. Research has shown that many different factors can bias our attention, from external events and emotional stimuli (such as a perceived threat to our safety) to internal states (such as hunger or sadness).

An illustration shows two pie charts labeled "Information" and "Perception." The "Information" chart is divided into many small, colorful sections, while the "Perception" chart has fewer, larger segments.

Where this bias occurs

Let’s say you want to improve your diet, so you decide to reduce the amount of sugar you eat. To work toward this goal, you resolve to buy fewer desserts when you go grocery shopping. However, one week, you have a particularly busy schedule, and you end up doing your grocery shopping at the end of a work day before you’ve had a chance to eat dinner. You try your very best to take your mind off the junk food aisle, but you can’t seem to stop thinking about your favorite snacks. Eventually, you cave and throw a couple of boxes of cookies into your cart, which you later end up eating.

In this example, the state of being hungry has biased your attention toward foods that can quickly satisfy your energy needs—like sugar—and made it much more difficult for you to follow through on your plan. Attentional bias most often pops up when we’re facing emotionally charged information or stimuli, such as hunger, angry faces, or threatening words. An attentional bias to threat allows us to identify potential dangers in our environment quickly but can make us overly sensitive to what we perceive to be threatening cues in our daily life, even when we are relatively safe.

Related Biases

Individual effects

While selective attention can help us filter out distractions and stay focused on important information, it becomes a problem when we display biased attention for emotionally charged information over more objective information. As a result, an inability to control our attentional allocation can impact our mental well-being and decision-making processes in several different ways.

Limited focus

Our attention is a finite resource: there are limits to how much we can attend to at any given time. In order to make rational decisions, ideally, we would want to consider all of our options and examine them each in turn. When attentional bias shows up, however, we end up directing a much larger share of our focus toward a single option or stimulus, and this comes at the expense of others. It can also make it more difficult for us to let go of distracting or unhelpful thoughts, causing us instead to fixate on (and overthink) certain things. This prevents us from thoroughly examining all the options available to us. Instead, we can get stuck in a kind of analysis paralysis that compromises our cognitive control. We end up looping over a particular concern and ultimately experiencing indecision and mental exhaustion. Whether at work or home, focusing too much on minor details can derail our productivity and make it difficult to tackle big-picture tasks that give us a sense of growth and accomplishment.

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Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.


Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Emotional impact

As mentioned, attentional bias often causes us to focus on emotional stimuli over neutral stimuli. Sometimes this means we’re biased toward positive emotional stimuli, which can have a beneficial effect on our mental well-being. However, attentional bias is more often associated with negative or threat-related stimuli, which can cause us to focus on threatening information over neutral stimuli in our environment or ruminate on distressing thoughts. Research suggests this may be a contributing factor to emotional disorders. For example, depression is associated with an attentional bias toward negative stimuli and away from positive stimuli.12 When confronted with both emotional and neutral stimuli, people with depression often display an attentional bias for negative stimuli but lack an attentional bias for positive stimuli, while people without depression display an attentional bias for both types of emotional stimuli. It could be that attentional bias exacerbates the emotional vulnerability of people with depression, increasing their susceptibility to negative emotions.

Attentional bias can also impact how we feel about social interactions. When socializing with others, we often fixate on people’s facial expressions, looking for subtle cues that tell us how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking. This allows us to pick up subtle changes in expression that may indicate a threat—such as raised eyebrows, frowns, or shifts in eye contact. While reading other people’s expressions is valuable for fully understanding our conversation partners, focusing too intently on these facial cues makes it easy to misinterpret the reactions of others as negative.

Anxiety disorders

The link between attentional bias and anxiety disorders is well-documented and widely researched. Several studies show that anxious individuals tend to exhibit greater attentional bias toward threat-related stimuli over neutral stimuli than non-anxious individuals.20 Overall, threatening stimuli are more likely to hold visual attention in people with anxiety, and this occurs whether people are high in state anxiety (temporary anxiety that fluctuates and resolves after the threat passes) or trait anxiety (a relatively stable predisposition to anxiety across different situations). Not only that, but trait-anxious individuals show greater selective attention to threatening information, meaning they can detect threat-related stimuli more quickly than neutral stimuli and have difficulty disengaging from threatening information.

A popular study conducted in 2005 by Yair Bar-Haim and colleagues highlighted some interesting ways attentional bias shows up when anxious individuals process facial expressions.21 To compare threat-related attentional bias in people with varying levels of trait anxiety, Bar-Haim et al. showed faces with different expressions to high-anxious and low-anxious people, then asked participants to identify a shape that appeared randomly around each face. They found that high-anxious individuals were slower to identify shapes, regardless of facial expression, suggesting that they were more fixated on facial cues, even if these cues were not necessarily threatening. Moreover, threatening faces seemed to hold their visual attention even more readily than non-threatening faces. When measuring brain activity, Bar-Haim et al. found that anxious people reacted more quickly and strongly to threatening faces compared to those with low anxiety, explaining that their slower reaction time was likely due to increased attention on the threatening faces.

As you might expect, this heightened tendency to focus on threatening information also manifests in specific anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). More specifically, people with these various disorders tend to focus on threatening information that aligns with related fears. For example, research shows that people with social anxiety disorder display increased selective attention to threatening social information while people with PTSD pay more attention to threats that are trauma-related.22 Similarly, those with panic disorder possess heightened attentional vigilance for threat stimuli related to their panic symptoms, and those with OCD to stimuli related to their obsessive concerns.

Systemic effects

As we’ve seen, attentional bias can significantly affect our maintenance of attention, drawing our focus toward specific stimuli and causing us to overlook other information. This selective focus can have severe consequences in various fields, from law enforcement to addiction treatment.

Law enforcement

Attentional bias carries implications for many institutions where people are tasked with making quick decisions under stress. One important example pertains to law enforcement. One study demonstrated that police officers who were experiencing high levels of anxiety were more likely to shoot at suspects during a training exercise, suggesting that anxiety biased the officers to narrowly focus on threat-related information.1 This heightened attention to threat can cause police officers to misread stressful situations and respond from a position of fear rather than calm rationality.

Attentional bias is also highly relevant to racial profiling and prejudice in policing. In our culture, Black people, particularly young men, are frequently and erroneously depicted as dangerous criminals. This image is so ubiquitous that many individuals, including police officers, implicitly associate Black faces with crime.2, 3 This results in a biasing of attention toward Black people, and overanalyzing normal behaviors as “suspicious” when they are being carried out by a Black person.

Addiction treatment

Individuals struggling with a substance use disorder may also be negatively impacted by attentional bias. Drug dependence produces an attentional bias for the drug in question, causing addicted individuals to fixate on stimuli related to the substance in question.5 Moreover, one study that followed heroin addicts as they embarked on a treatment program found that attentional bias was predictive of relapse: the more participants exhibited heroin-related attention bias before starting treatment, the more likely they were to have relapsed by the 3-month mark.6 This underscores the importance, in rehabilitation, of removing any drug-related stimuli from one’s day-to-day environment.

Why it happens

In part, attentional bias is just a consequence of our limited cognitive abilities as humans. As mentioned above, we have a finite capacity for attention; as much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we can really only focus on a small number of things at a time. There are various evolutionary and cognitive explanations for why certain things consistently bias our attention.

Biased attention carries evolutionary advantages

Although attentional bias can lead to flawed reasoning and unbalanced decision making, in prehistoric times, it is likely that certain biases resulted in behaviour that facilitated survival. One important example is our bias to focus on food. Research suggests that the human attentional system is tuned to attend more to food than nonfood items.7 Hunger amplifies this effect through attentional bias.4

Similarly, although modern research has linked attentional bias for threatening information to clinical anxiety disorders,8 in the past, being vigilant and responsive to potential dangers in one’s environment could actually have been the difference between life and death. Individuals who had these traits were probably more likely to survive and pass on their genes, letting these biases proliferate throughout our species.

Importantly, attentional biases that proved to be an advantage in the ancient past may not be advantageous today. Our environment has changed profoundly: for most people, food is available in abundance, and we no longer have to worry about guarding the village from sabertooth tigers. But our brains retain the hardwiring that benefited our ancestors, even if it is no longer appropriate.

We attend to information consistent with our schemas

Our brains rely on many shortcuts and rules of thumb to speed up processing and help us navigate the world. Schemas, or frameworks that help us organize and sort information, are one type of shortcut. We have schemas for virtually everything we encounter in our day-to-day life, from people we meet to situations we encounter. As an example, your schema for your friend Julie might include information such as “tall,” “plays hockey,” and “hates spicy food.”

The majority of the time, schemas are useful tools that our brains use to sort through the massive amount of information it must process every day. However, they can also facilitate attentional bias: people are more likely to attend to information that matches up with their existing schemas, and to ignore information that does not. People with depression, for instance, tend to have schemas that are negative about themselves and the world,11 and are also biased to attend to negative information over positive information.12 By contrast, people not experiencing depression are generally biased towards positivity.

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Why it is important

In our personal and professional lives, attentional bias can give us tunnel vision, overemphasizing some elements of our environment and blinding us to others. When we narrowly focus on one or two things, we end up overthinking them, assigning them greater importance in our decision-making than we should. For example, company executives might focus too much on a particular measurement of their employees’ productivity, and end up ignoring other valuable indicators of performance. This kind of tunnel vision can cause us to make misguided decisions, act impulsively, or take unnecessary risks. That same executive might overlook a great employee for a promotion because they’re fixated on a minor past mistake, rather than considering the valuable contributions they made to the company. A similar thing can happen in our personal relationships. Perhaps we break up with a romantic partner because we can’t stop thinking about a particular flaw, overlooking the many positive aspects of the relationship that make it worthwhile.

Other times, a bias toward emotional information might cause us to make decisions without more objective sources of data. We might overlook practical solutions to problems because we’re focusing on emotionally charged details—like fixating on the rare side effects of a medication that is likely to be effective in treating an illness. This is one of the many reasons why it’s so difficult to make rational decisions under stress. Attentional bias limits our cognitive control, causing us to focus on minor details and miss the bigger picture. The bias can make small hurdles seem insurmountable and problems seem more severe than they really are. It’s easy to overreact in these situations, making decisions that are not only irrational but risky and impulsive. Learning how to avoid attentional bias and broaden your focus in the face of emotional stimuli can help you avoid these pitfalls.

How to avoid it

It is difficult to completely avoid attentional bias. Often, the influence of this type of bias on our thinking is at such a deep, automatic level that we are not aware it is happening. However, there are a few ways you can develop top-down attentional control to better manage your attentional responses and minimize the mental health impact of threat-related attention bias.

Feedback and practice

In some cases, it appears that it is possible to reduce the effects of attentional biases through training. For instance, depressed participants can be trained to focus more on positive stimuli.12 However, in this context, study participants were not merely practicing on their own; instead, they were receiving feedback from the researchers that reinforced focus on positive stimuli and discouraged focus on the negative. To apply this in the real world, if there is a specific type of attentional bias one is looking to avoid, it might help to enlist a friend or family member who can point out moments you fall into biased thinking, and offer reminders to zoom out.

For individuals suffering from depression or anxiety, some treatments, such as cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), involve examining attentional bias and learning strategies to challenge it. This is often done using worksheets, where the client recounts an upsetting situation and explores the role that attentional bias might have played in how they interpreted it.

Plan around bias pitfalls

For some types of attentional bias, it is often possible to plan in a way that minimizes the risk of that bias arising. Remember our hypothetical trip to the grocery store? Scheduling your food shopping for sometime one is not likely to be hungry—after dinner, for example—will likely reduce attentional bias for unhealthy items, making it easier to avoid them.

Try some mindfulness exercises

In recent years, mindfulness meditation is often prescribed as a tool to boost attention and improve productivity. As much as it has become a buzzword, there is actually empirical evidence to support the effectiveness of mindfulness practice—including as a tool to reduce attentional bias.

In one study, researchers compared attentional bias in experienced meditators versus non-meditators. The participants were shown images of both neutral and emotional expressions, and their eye movements were tracked. The results showed that meditators spent significantly less time looking at angry and fearful faces. What’s more, while non-meditators showed attentional bias for both angry and happy faces, meditators only showed this effect for happy faces.

This experiment suggests that, over time, getting into the habit of mindfulness meditation can minimize certain kinds of attentional bias. One caveat: the meditators in this study had been practicing mindfulness, on average, for over twelve years—not a commitment most of us are willing or able to make. Luckily, other research has found that even shorter mindfulness programs can help reduce attentional bias.17

To try this yourself, aim to increase your awareness of where your selective attention is directed throughout the day. If you notice you’re fixating on emotionally charged information, try deliberately redirecting your attention to something neutral, like a sound in your environment or the feeling of your breath moving through your body. Repeatedly practicing this in various contexts and situations can help you achieve disengagement of attention from threat-related stimuli and build better top-down attentional control.

FAQ

What are the two types of attentional bias that can be measured? 

There are two different ways researchers can explore and measure attentional bias: within-subject and between-subject. Measuring within-subject attentional bias involves comparing how an individual’s attention changes in response to different types of stimuli—typically threatening and non-threatening. For example, researchers might explore how quickly an individual responds to threatening expressions vs neutral expressions. Measuring between-subject attentional bias involves comparing differences in attention between groups—such as anxious and non-anxious people—when exposing them to the same stimuli. Both of these measures can tell us valuable information about the mechanisms that impact attention and behavior. 

For instance, in a large systematic review, Bar-Haim et al. found that individuals often show a bias toward threat-related information (within-subject bias) and that anxious individuals tend to display greater attention toward threats than non-anxious people (between-subject bias).23 Interestingly, within-subject trials tell us that anxious people don’t always show a strong bias toward a threat compared to a neutral stimulus. Results from between-subject trials suggest that this is because non-anxious people tend to avoid threats while anxious people tend to show increased attention toward both threatening and neutral information.

What research methods are used to assess attentional bias?

Several methods are used to measure attention, each designed to examine different attentional processes and address different research questions.24 The most common research methods for evaluating attentional bias are:

  • The dot-probe task: Two stimuli are presented to participants at the same time (such as one emotional word and one neutral word). The stimuli then disappear and a dot appears in the spot previously occupied by one of the stimuli. Participants are asked to indicate the location of the dot as fast as possible, with the assumption that people will display faster responses when their attention is already focused on the location of a certain stimulus. In the dot-probe task, attentional bias is measured based on individual differences in response times between probes that replace threatening stimuli (called congruent trials) and probes that replace neutral stimuli (called incongruent trials).
  • The emotional Stroop task: Participants are presented with emotionally charged words and neutral words one at a time in random order, written in various colors. Participants are asked to name the color and ignore the meaning of the word. The Stroop task measures the time it takes for participants to name the color. The idea is that participants will be slower to name colors when they are paying more attention to the meaning of the word, again indicating an attentional bias. 
  • The visual search task: Participants are presented with a visual display of various stimuli, such as words or images, which usually include both threatening and neutral items. The participants are then asked to locate a specific target word or image in the display. Researchers measure how quickly participants can identify the target—and if they do so correctly—to determine if there is an attentional bias toward certain information.
  • The eye-tracking task: Participants are presented with stimuli and their eye movements are tracked to see where they look and fixate. This task suggests that fixating on a particular word or image may indicate an attentional bias.

These various research methods allow researchers to explore how attentional bias shows up in various contexts, such as in response to threatening ideas, imagery, or facial expressions. These methods allow researchers to determine the impact of individual differences (like personality traits and anxiety disorders) and contextual factors (like time or environment) on attention. Researchers also use these methods to measure attentional disengagement, exploring how easily or quickly people can disengage from emotional stimuli.

What is attentional control theory?

Attentional control theory (ACT) explains how anxiety affects cognitive performance, specifically related to our ability to control where our attention goes.25 The theory suggests that anxiety affects two elements of attentional control: our ability to inhibit automatic reactions to certain stimuli and our ability to deliberately shift our attention between stimuli. According to researchers Eysenck et al., anxiety impairs our top-down attentional control, making it difficult to disengage from threatening stimuli but also heightens the degree to which we are distracted by threat-related stimuli in our environment. This may be why anxious individuals often struggle to pull their attention away from concerns or focus on tasks that demand sustained attention.

How it all started

One of the most popular tests for attentional bias originated with an American psychologist named John Ridley Stroop. In 1935, Stroop conducted a now-famous experiment, wherein he presented participants with the names of colors written in various colors of ink. Each word belonged to one of 3 groups: neutral (written in black ink), congruent (the color name matched the color of the ink), or incongruent (the color name did not match the color of the ink). Participants were asked to simply read the written color name aloud, ignoring the color of the ink. It was found that people were slower to name the color when the name and ink colors were incongruent. This paradigm is now known as the Stroop Task.

While previous studies on attentional bias mostly used the original Stroop task, newer research more often relies on a modified version of the Stroop task, known as the Emotional Stroop (ES) Task. The ES task, which became widespread in the 1980s, was designed to assess attentional capture by emotionally charged words.14 In this version, instead of reading color names, participants were told to say aloud the color in which each word was written. Additionally, all the words were grouped according to their emotional value: neutral (e.g., “tree”), positive (e.g., “holiday”), or negative (e.g., “hatred”).15 Slower reaction times were interpreted to mean that deeper processing of a given word was taking place, suggesting a possible attentional bias.

Numerous variations of the ES were conducted in this period, testing patients in a wide range of groups. It was these studies that first established certain attentional biases that are now well-known. For example, Gotlib and McCann (1984) found that depressed participants were slower to name the colors of negative words; in Mathews and MacLeod (1985), anxious patients were slower for threatening words, particularly words that were related to an individual’s particular fears; and Watts et al. (1986) showed that arachnophobes were delayed when reading spider-related words.14 

Example 1 - Difficulties of quitting smoking

People who smoke tobacco are known to have attentional bias for cigarettes and other smoking-related cues. An adapted version of the Stroop task provides empirical evidence of this: smokers, in comparison to non-smokers, are slower to color-name smoking-related words versus neutral words.18

For smokers who decide to quit, this can be a major stumbling block, causing them to fixate on objects or situate that they associate with smoking. Attentional bias leads smokers to direct more of their mental energy towards thinking about and processing smoking-related cues, which in turn increases the craving for tobacco. Furthermore, anything that the individual has associated with cigarette smoking in their own life could potentially trigger this preoccupation, including stimuli and situations that aren’t strictly related to tobacco—for example, the cup of coffee that would normally be accompanied by a cigarette.

Example 2 - Differences in political beliefs

Our political ideologies have obviously shaped our knowledge about the world. However, what information we pay attention to and remember is subject to bias. Research even suggests that selective attentional bias in conservatives and liberals might contribute to differences in political beliefs.

In one study, researchers had students of different political affiliations complete the Emotional Stroop Task, as well as other measures of attentional bias. The results showed that liberals were biased to focus on words with emotionally positive content, while conservatives focused more on the negative.19 This may indicate that our differences in beliefs may stem from very basic attentional processes, automatically filtering out separate kinds of information and orienting us towards different sets of data.

Summary

What it is

Attentional bias describes how we often direct our attention more to some things than others. When we are making decisions, this can cause us to fixate on a small subset of data points and ignore the rest.

Why it happens

Our attention is a finite resource; focusing on one thing comes at the expense of others. Faced with a massive amount of incoming information every second, our brains are constantly trying to figure out what is most worthy of our concentration. Some stimuli that tend to bias our attention, such as hunger and anxiety, likely have evolutionary roots. Other times, our attention can be biased by cognitive schemas that we have acquired over the course of our lives.

Example 1 - Why attentional bias makes it harder to quit smoking

When trying to quit smoking, reminders of cigarettes and tobacco can contribute to cravings, and eventually to relapse. This is largely because ex-smokers have attentional bias for tobacco-related cues, which causes them to process these cues more deeply than a non-smoker would.

Example 2 - How attentional bias contributes to differences in political beliefs

Attentional bias may contribute to different political beliefs by causing people to selectively focus on different kinds of information. Conservatives have an attentional bias for words with negative emotional content, while liberals are biased towards positive emotional content.

How to avoid it

Because attentional bias takes place at a very basic, automatic level of cognition, it is difficult to avoid it altogether. In some cases, it may be possible to plan around possible triggers of bias. Feedback and practice can also decrease attentional bias, as can mindfulness practice.

Sources

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About the Authors

A man in a blue, striped shirt smiles while standing indoors, surrounded by green plants and modern office decor.

Dan Pilat

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

A smiling man stands in an office, wearing a dark blazer and black shirt, with plants and glass-walled rooms in the background.

Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. A decision scientist with a PhD in Decision Neuroscience from McGill University, Sekoul's work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at conferences around the world. Sekoul previously advised management on innovation and engagement strategy at The Boston Consulting Group as well as on online media strategy at Google. He has a deep interest in the applications of behavioral science to new technology and has published on these topics in places such as the Huffington Post and Strategy & Business.

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I was blown away with their application and translation of behavioral science into practice. They took a very complex ecosystem and created a series of interventions using an innovative mix of the latest research and creative client co-creation. I was so impressed at the final product they created, which was hugely comprehensive despite the large scope of the client being of the world's most far-reaching and best known consumer brands. I'm excited to see what we can create together in the future.

Heather McKee

BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

GLOBAL COFFEEHOUSE CHAIN PROJECT

OUR CLIENT SUCCESS

$0M

Annual Revenue Increase

By launching a behavioral science practice at the core of the organization, we helped one of the largest insurers in North America realize $30M increase in annual revenue.

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Increase in Monthly Users

By redesigning North America's first national digital platform for mental health, we achieved a 52% lift in monthly users and an 83% improvement on clinical assessment.

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Reduction In Design Time

By designing a new process and getting buy-in from the C-Suite team, we helped one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world reduce software design time by 75%.

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Reduction in Client Drop-Off

By implementing targeted nudges based on proactive interventions, we reduced drop-off rates for 450,000 clients belonging to USA's oldest debt consolidation organizations by 46%

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