How Context Shapes Attention
And what it’s doing to your writing
Why do people help in some situations but not others?
That was the question social psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson set out to answer in their now-classic Good Samaritan experiment in 1973.
Their subjects were seminary students training to become priests. Each student was told to walk to another building to deliver a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan.
But there was a twist.
Some students were told they were already late and needed to hurry. Others were told they had plenty of time, though they should head over soon.
On the path between buildings, each student encountered the same scene: a man slumped in a doorway, coughing, groaning, and clearly in distress.
From a distance, Darley and Batson observed what happened next.
And what they found was quite surprising: Among the students who believed they were late, only 10% stopped to help. Among those who thought they had time, 63% did.
Everyone in the study knew the story of the Good Samaritan and was literally on their way to preach it. This was a group that held the same beliefs, values, and moral knowledge.
But the different contexts changed their behavior.
The group in the hurried context had their attention narrowed. Their vision was focused on being late, on disappointing other people they cared, and that pressure crowded out the space required for compassion.
Which raises a more interesting question than whether people are “good” or “bad”:
What kinds of contexts shrink our capacity to notice—and which ones expand it?
Contexts That Narrow Attention
If you’re a writer or creative on the internet, you’re always at risk of falling behind.
I felt this most clearly while growing my Twitter account. For a while, everything I posted seemed to work. My tweets were gaining momentum—sometimes even hundreds of thousands of views.
Then I took a few days off to spend time with my family.
When I came back, my reach collapsed.
Nothing explicit had changed. No rule had been broken. But the message was clear enough: if you don’t show up, even for a few days, you become invisible. That wasn’t the only warning, though.
At the time, I was playing the growth game by the tee: hook templates, thread frameworks, and a running list of topics that reliably performed well on Twitter. I learned them by studying other successful creators, and for a while, they worked like a charm.
But when I tried to write outside those formulas, something else became clear. Tweets that didn’t fit the pattern massively underperform. It didn’t matter that I had 10,000 followers. The algorithm would only show these posts to a fraction of them.
At first, these felt like small moments I could brush off as “part of the game.” But over time, I noticed the feedback stopped arriving after I published. I began to feel it earlier—before I even opened a blank page.
Certain ideas no longer felt worth even considering. I found myself editing out lines because they weren’t punchy enough. Whatever slowed down the pace, no matter how relevant, didn’t make it to the final draft.
Writing turned into compliance. Not because anyone told me to do so, but because the context trained my attention around a single, unspoken question:
What must I do right now to avoid negative consequences?
In the Good Samaritan experiment, being “late” didn’t make people cruel. It made them narrow.
And the online world reproduces that same condition at scale.
It gives you dashboards that reward some behaviors and punish others. It constantly surfaces people in your niche who are winning, inviting comparison and imitation. And it surrounds you with step-by-step advice from those who already made it.
You might manage to dodge all of this. Like the 10% of seminarians who stopped to help, you might inhabit this context and still keep your attention open.
I’m not quite there yet. So I’ve chosen to place most of my attention somewhere else—into a different kind of context, one that allows it to widen again.
Where Attention Widens
I can feel the difference in my body as I write this.
There’s no pressure to publish every day, no character limit to work around, no need to compress an idea into a narrow framework just because that’s what feeds the algorithm.
What newsletters offer me is a meaningful shift in control. No matter what I write, this email lands in your inbox. Only you decide whether you want to keep listening.
The intermediary that once dictated how my attention should behave has stepped back. In that space, reflection, nuance, and care become possible again—without being punished for them.
Now, instead of asking “What must I do right now to avoid negative consequences?” I find myself asking:
“What curiosity do I want to explore next?”
I won’t pretend the algorithm’s grip disappears overnight. After a decade of playing by its rules, some habits linger.
But distance changes attention. And slowly, that change works its way through you.
What’s becoming clearer to me is that the challenge often isn’t fixing ourselves, or heroically resisting the system. It’s becoming more deliberate about the contexts we inhabit—and about how much of our time and attention we give to each.
Not all contexts are chosen, and many constraints are non-negotiable. Work, money, and obligation shape where we must show up. But even within those limits, attention shifts depending on where we place the agency we do have.
If you spend most of your time in constraining environments, you eventually find yourself playing by their rules and losing your sense of authorship.
But the opposite extreme carries its own risk. If you only inhabit expanding contexts, you may never be tested. Restraint becomes situational. What looks like virtue survives because it’s protected—not because it’s resilient.
So the balance matters.
For me, this has turned into a simple practice:
Spend most of your time in contexts that widen attention. Enter constraining ones intentionally, briefly, and with purpose. Before you do, ask yourself: What am I here to practice? What signal will tell me it’s time to leave? What cost am I willing to pay?
If you can’t answer those questions, the context will answer them for you.
And over time, context shapes who we become capable of being.