It is tempting to call this irrational. It is more useful to ask what it is for. In the studies we have, the effect is modest, reliable and almost entirely ignored by the people it describes. What looks like attention from the outside is usually something simpler from the inside: tiredness, a deadline, a wish not to look foolish. We describe the departure from the model as an error. We might equally describe the model as a hopeful guess about us.
What follows
Put a number on attention and it becomes a target; put a target on it and the number stops meaning what it meant. The lesson is modest. Build for the person who exists, not the one in the model. Nobody sets out to be governed by the shortcut, yet it shapes an astonishing share of the ordinary day. Consider the shortcut. It is a small thing, and small things are where habits live.
The textbook treats attention as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact. Every one of us runs the same shortcut, and every one of us believes we are the exception. The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for reformers: people are not waiting to be corrected. Institutions know all this, of course, which is why the shortcut is so rarely left to chance.
