John Burn-Murdoch

We have these devices now which are always competing for our attention.

And, you know, we are what we give our attention to.

I know you've done a huge amount of work on this space, but being conscientious is about delivering on the goals you made for yourself.

And distraction is almost by definition is taking you away from what you thought, what you meant to be doing.

Similarly, when it comes to intelligence, the way I've been thinking about whether it's intelligence or conscientiousness is we have an innate capacity and then we have the deployment of that capacity.

And so someone might be super smart, people might be as smart today as ever, even smarter.

But if our ability to express those smarts, as it were, keeps getting outcompeted, displaced by or distracted by devices, technology, then we're just not able to bring that to bear in the same way.

So I think it's possible that similar things are going on there.

And

People like the analogy of muscles.

You have your attention muscles, you have your focus muscles, your conscientiousness muscles.

And if digital technologies, digital distractions start pushing aside our sort of conscientiousness workouts or intellect workouts, those things could atrophy.

So that's the framework that I think is maybe useful for understanding what could be happening with both of these.

I think we can just think about this quite mechanistically.

Extroversion is related to one's capacity to make new friends or relationships.

Think about all this just as a funnel.

Less goes into the funnel, less comes out of the funnel.

If people are spending less time going out either physically or just going up to other people and talking to them, that is going to reduce the size of friendship groups.

It could be playing a role in the decline of relationship formation that we've seen.

Conscientiousness, similarly, if people become less reliable, less dependable, they're going to find that those friendships start getting weaker.