Conserved Attention Theory (CAT)
From physical constraints to social emergence
Why do we say “thank you” to chatbots? Why does political polarization resist every information campaign thrown at it? Why do people report grief when loved ones change their identities?
These turn out to be the same question.
In January 2026, I preprinted Conserved Attention Theory: From Physical Constraints to Social Emergence, a “neurons to nations” framework where I argue that complex social behavior at every scale emerges from the convergence of private, individual attention spaces, and that these spaces remain subject to thermodynamics and entropy. The claim is not a metaphor: social organization is physical, and its creation and maintenance have real energetic costs. Change the physical or fail to maintain it, and behaviors — and society — change.
The paper grew out of a set of foundational postulates I’ve been developing since 2008 and published in May 2025, which laid out a theory of social behavior from a few working assumptions:
that attention is a scarce resource
that it is effectively zero-sum
that it is self-reinforcing
that it attenuates
While developing a book-length treatment (still in progress), I realized I needed to distill the core into something academically rigorous. Of course, once I dug in, I discovered that several of these starting assumptions needed significant refinement.
Most importantly, I realized the postulates were missing a critical micro-level mechanism. From trying to understand why we care about attention at all, it became obvious that humans have a reflex-level detector for incoming attention similar to how pareidolia detects faces and the HADD detects agency, but operating on attention itself. I call this reflex parechoia (PsyArXiv), and propose that it triggers reciprocity reflexes even in the absence of a face or an agent.
This is, I believe, one of our most important structural biases. It’s why we thank chatbots, comfort crying strangers, and feel watched in empty rooms. And in a world increasingly filled with technologies that mimic attentive behavior — whether by design or by accident — it fires constantly. (A fun example: in one study, participants attributed cognition and intent to an automatic door based purely on how it moved — Ju & Takayama, 2009.)
CAT builds on parechoia and thermodynamic constraints to make four moves. It:
defines attention as conserved per-instant allocation of bounded processing resources;
demonstrates that allocation results in persistent physical artifacts that bias future allocation in a feedback loop;
models the resulting landscape of biases as an emergent per-actor attention space; and
shows that the convergence of overlapping attention spaces is sufficient for social behavior to emerge — without requiring a separate ontological social layer.
The result is a physically grounded, thermodynamically constrained, implementation-agnostic architecture intended to offer a unifying foundation across the social sciences; it does not replace existing frameworks, but provides a parsimonious bridging primitive where they appear to conflict.
As a sample application, the paper examines political polarization. In the CAT lens, this is not a moral or epistemic failure, but is the natural formation of competing convergence basins: once your attention is captured by heavyweight clusters of internal encodings and external artifacts, it’s far more probable that it stays captured within that cluster than not. Escape is too expensive, and freely reallocated attention is too scarce. From this perspective, information-based interventions like media literacy campaigns and fact-checking will systematically underperform: they don’t account for or subsidize the real energetic costs they impose on demand-saturated actors who would have to rebuild their social identities to leave a basin.
I believe CAT can offer similarly grounded insights across other persistent social problems: how social media affects us, why climate inaction persists, what makes identity changes so costly for everyone involved, and more.
Read the paper here.
Archived on SocArXiv — DOI: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/26ngp_v1
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