Attention Economy Psychology: How Rage Bait, Emotion & Scarcity Spend Your Cognitive Bandwidth (2025)

Your attention is not just being stolen; it’s being traded.

First by platforms. Then by other people. And, long before that, by your own emotions, worries, and habits inside your head.

By 2025 that trade has a new mascot: rage bait; content tuned to provoke anger because outrage is still the most reliable engagement engine in the feed.

But rage bait is just the neon sign on top of a deeper system.

Before any algorithm runs an ad auction, your internal attention economy has already run one.

In that internal economy, emotions bid for focus, cognitive bandwidth behaves like a finite budget, and scarcity of time, money, stability, acts like a tax that quietly erodes what’s left.

Interfaces, from social media to museum installations, either hack this system for engagement or help you re-architect it.

In this article, I treat attention economy psychology as the study of that internal market.

I connect research on scarcity, bandwidth, and emotion-driven decisions with my practice in interactive art and attention architecture to show:

1. How the internal attention market works.
2. How rage bait exploits it.
3. How platforms, institutions, and designers profit from that exploitation.
4. And how we can design experiences and personal practices that actually protect, rather than drain, your cognitive bandwidth.

What Is Attention Economy Psychology?

From Platforms to the Internal Attention Market

Your attention is scarce and monetizable.

Platforms package attention, sell it to advertisers, and turn your moments of focus into an asset class (Globis Insights, 2025).

News feeds, infinite scroll, and notifications, these are all infrastructure for turning your gaze into someone else’s revenue.

But that macro market only works because of a parallel micro market inside your mind.

At this micro level, your cognitive system constantly allocates a limited pool of attention across:

1. Planning and problem-solving
2. Background worries
3. Messages and feeds
4. Sensory input
5. Internal narratives and self-talk

Attention economy psychology zooms in on that allocation: 

Which cues rise to the top? How do emotions reprioritize the queue? How does scarcity drain the system’s capacity to decide well? 

For clarity, think in two layers:

1. Macro attention markets: Platforms, media, advertising, institutional programming; systems that trade in attention capital and treat focus as symbolic currency (Heitmayer, 2025).
2. Micro internal markets: Emotional bids, bandwidth constraints, habits, and self-control efforts inside each person.

Rage bait lives at the intersection.

It’s not a random mutation of the internet; it’s a deliberate product tuned for a world where:

1. Macro systems reward anything that boosts engagement.
2. Micro systems are already depleted by stress, scarcity, and overload.

Attention economy psychology gives us a vocabulary for this interaction. Once you see rage bait as a strategy that targets a predictable internal market, not just as “bad content”, you can start designing counter strategies.

Scarcity and Cognitive Bandwidth

Limited Attention Is the Default, Not the Exception

Attention Is What Information Consumes

Herbert Simon’s point still cuts through the noise: in an information-rich world, the scarce resource is attention, not data (Simon, 1971).

Every notification, headline, or clip isn’t just “free content”; it’s a claim on your finite capacity.

More information equals to more competition for the same mental slot.

Under constant competition, attentional scarcity becomes the baseline state, not an occasional inconvenience.

If you see attention as what information consumes, the story flips:

1. You’re not “choosing” from a neutral buffet.
2. Every new stream such as news, chats, ambient screens, adds new claimants to your bandwidth queue.
3. Attention starts to look like symbolic currency you can spend but never reclaim (Heitmayer, 2025).

And in a crowded market, what wins?

Not the most nuanced, but the most efficient at exploiting scarcity; fast, emotional, easy to process content.

Cognitive Bandwidth as a Shared Budget

Now widen the frame: cognitive bandwidth is the shared pool of attention, working memory, and self-control you have at any moment (BehavioralEconomics.com, 2024).

It’s not just how long you can stare at a screen; it’s:

1. How many complex tasks you can juggle.
2. How many unresolved worries you’re carrying.
3. How much self-regulation is left for resisting “just one more scroll”.

Scarcity research shows that when you’re short on time, money, or social stability, an invisible bandwidth tax kicks in (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013).

Your mental resources get locked onto urgent concerns, leaving less for:

1. Planning
2. Reflection
3. Long-term trade offs

Kalil et al. (2023) show this concretely: parents under financial and social scarcity miss important preschool communications not because they don’t care, but because their cognitive bandwidth is already saturated.

Picture your bandwidth as a pie chart:

1. Non-negotiable slices: logistics, caregiving, health.
2. Background slices: money stress, relationship anxiety, political dread.
3. Whatever remains is your entire budget for deep work, creative exploration, and the tiny act of deciding whether to open a feed.

That remainder is what everything in the attention economy is fighting over.

Why Scarcity Makes You Easy to Capture

Bandwidth scarcity doesn’t just make life harder; it changes your decision rules.

When the budget is tight, you:

1. Default to habits and autopilot.
2. Respond to emotionally loud, cognitively cheap stimuli.
3. Let the interface decide what you see next.

From a platform’s perspective, this is gold. 

Low bandwidth means low resistance:

1. Less capacity to evaluate trade offs.
2. Less energy for “Do I even want this in my head?”
3. More vulnerability to high-arousal hooks like rage bait.

Scarcity isn’t just background; it’s the precondition that lets rage bait outperform everything else.

Not because you don’t care about nuance or truth, but because your cognitive margin is too thin to afford them.

Emotions as Prices

Emotional Salience equals Internal Pricing Mechanism

If bandwidth is the budget, emotion is the pricing system.

Emotional salience decides which stimuli stand out, demand processing, and feel impossible to ignore. Research on emotion and attention shows that affective states modulate what we notice, how long we look, and what risks we perceive (De Martino, 2008).

In the internal attention economy:

1. Fear and outrage carry a high urgency premium; they feel expensive to ignore.
2. Curiosity and joy offer different bids; less urgent, but often more aligned with growth.
3. Neutral, slow information feels like high effort, low immediate reward.

This is why the pricing metaphor matters:

If external systems repeatedly crank up certain emotions, they can distort the internal market. Rage bait is a strategy to overprice anger.

Everyday Life as Micro Transactions of Feeling

Your day is basically a series of emotional micro trades:

1. You check a notification instead of staying with a hard task. → You trade bandwidth for a small payoff: relief, validation, or comfort.
2. You click an outrage headline instead of a slower explainer. → You trade bandwidth for an intense hit of moral certainty.

Platforms run constant experiments to learn which emotional bids convert your attention:

1. Wording.
2. Image choice.
3. Timing.

Over time, they learn your personal price list: which flavors of rage bait, envy bait, or curiosity bait reliably make you transact.

When I design interactive installations, I use a similar model, but with different intentions.

I’m not asking “What will make people tap?” so much as “What emotional sequence sustains curiosity without tipping into exhaustion?”

Same internal market. Different goals.

Bandwidth Multiplying vs. Bandwidth Draining States

Not all emotional states spend bandwidth the same way.

1. Bandwidth multiplying states: curiosity, intrinsic motivation, flow-like engagement. These make complex tasks feel lighter and extend your tolerance for depth (Wojtowicz, 2020).
2. Bandwidth draining states: chronic anxiety, sustained outrage, hypervigilance. These narrow your focus, spike your stress, and quickly deplete reserves.

A useful distinction in the internal attention economy:

1. States that expand the field: curiosity, wonder, deep interest.
2. States that collapse the field: rage, fear, constant interruption.

Rage bait is engineered to keep you in the second group.

High arousal equals high energy cost.

It burns through your budget while convincing you that you’re just “keeping up”.

The design and personal practice question becomes: 

How do we bias our environments toward bandwidth multiplying states, not bandwidth draining ones?

Rage Bait and the Outrage Industrial Complex

What Is Rage Bait? (Oxford Word of the Year 2025)

Rage bait is online content engineered to provoke anger or outrage in order to drive clicks, comments, and shares.

Its favorite forms:

1. Oversimplified hot takes
2. Provocative, often bad faith statements
3. Cropped clips ripped from context

The purpose is not understanding. It’s not conflict resolution.

The purpose is engagement.

The fact that “rage bait” has been named a Word of the Year tells you how central emotional manipulation has become to our shared language.

It means we are collectively recognizing a whole category of content whose primary goal is to harvest anger as a resource.

Important distinction:

1. Rage bait is engagement first, understanding… optional.
2. Genuine anger, critique, activism aim at change, accountability, solidarity.

The problem isn’t anger.

The problem is industrialized anger tuned for metrics.

Rage Bait as a High Volatility Emotional Asset

Inside your internal market, rage bait behaves like a high volatility asset:

1. It promises rapid, intense emotional returns.
2. It spikes metrics fast.
3. It’s risky and exhausting over time.

The loop:

1. You see a provocative piece of content.
2. You feel outraged.
3. You comment, share, stitch, quote-post.
4. The platform sees the spike and boosts the content.
5. The creator gains reach, revenue, or influence.

In a system where engagement is the main success metric, high volatility assets outperform slower, more nuanced work. 

Rage bait becomes an efficient way to farm attention, even if it destroys trust, context, and emotional health along the way.

From Engagement to Exhaustion

Metrics don’t show what rage bait costs you.

High arousal states like anger can feel empowering in the moment, but they’re:

1. Cognitively expensive.
2. Physiologically demanding.
3. Hard to sustain without burnout.

Over time, repeated exposure can:

1. Raise your baseline irritability and distrust.
2. Flatten your emotional range into “angry” or “numb.”
3. Make subtle, generous responses harder to access.

Soon the world starts to look like your feed: mostly conflict, incompetence, and bad faith. 

That perception isn’t imaginary; it’s a distortion created by the content that wins your internal auctions.

Rage bait doesn’t just hijack attention; it reconditions the bidding environment so that anger feels like the most relevant response to everything.

How Rage Bait Exploits Scarcity and Bandwidth

Rage bait thrives in low bandwidth conditions.

When you’re:

1. Tired
2. Stressed
3. Overloaded

…intense emotion is the easiest shortcut to feeling something.

Rage bait takes advantage of three facts:

1. Loud emotions cut through noise.
2. Depleted bandwidth reduces resistance.
3. Short term emotional hits feel “cheap” in the moment, expensive later.

Economically, it’s a bad trade for you:

1. You get a fast payoff in indignation.
2. You lose bandwidth, patience, and long term focus.
3. The hidden costs such as irritability, fatigue, distortion, never show up on your screen.

At scale, rage bait is the natural outcome of:

Bandwidth scarcity + emotional pricing biases + engagement optimized business models

Platforms as Brokers

This is how Attention Markets sell your focus back to you…

Attention Markets and Engagement Farming

Digital platforms act as brokers in attention markets.

They:

1. Run real-time auctions for your focus.
2. Match advertisers and content with the users most likely to react.
3. Trade in what Browne (2025) calls “attentional landscaping potential”, the power to shape what people see and think about.

Engagement farming is the strategy of tuning content and interfaces purely to maximize:

1. Clicks
2. Watch time
3. Shares

…regardless of what that content does to our cognitive or social environment.

In that system, rage bait is a perfect product:

1. It is cheap to make.
2. It is easy to test and iterate.
3. It consistently generates high engagement.

From an attention economy psychology perspective, this is simply the market optimizing for what best exploits our internal attention economies.

Cognitive Sovereignty Under Siege

Cognitive sovereignty is your capacity to decide what matters to you and where your attention goes.

When platforms can reliably:

1. Predict your emotional weak spots.
2. Trigger those states on demand.
3. Arrange your feed to keep you hooked.

…that sovereignty erodes. The Denny Center for Democratic Capitalism (2025) describes this as the collapse of cognitive sovereignty; we keep the illusion of choice while the options and emotional framing are increasingly pre-shaped.

On the surface, everything is “voluntary”:

1. You choose to scroll.
2. You choose to click.
3. You choose to react.

Underneath, though, the menu, order, and tone are optimized to steer your internal market toward whatever monetizes best.

When your bandwidth is already taxed, resisting that steering is almost impossible.

Emotional Pollution and Collective Externalities

Like any market that ignores externalities, the attention economy creates collective harms:

1. Polarization: extreme or simplistic views outperform nuanced ones.
2. Disinformation: emotionally charged lies spread faster than careful corrections.
3. Emotional pollution: ambient anxiety, distrust, and fatigue become normalized.

I find “emotional pollution” a useful metaphor:

1. Each rage bait post pays well individually.
2. But together they fill the shared cognitive environment with low grade toxicity.
3. Over time, constant outrage feels normal, and quiet focus feels strange.

If you’re designing systems or platforms, products, cultural programs, you have to treat cognitive bandwidth and emotional stability as environmental goods, not just personal preferences.

Attention Architecture

Attentional Landscaping in Museums, Apps, and Cities

Attention architecture (or attentional landscaping) is the practice of intentionally shaping how attention flows through:

1. Environments
2. Interfaces
3. Narratives

It treats exhibitions, apps, and public spaces as attention ecologies, not neutral containers.

Examples:

1. In a museum: Room sequence, label density, sound and light timing, and availability of real pause points all shape how visitors spend their cognitive budget.
2. In an app: Notification logic, feed depth, recommended loops, and exit ramps decide how easy it is to leave or shift to a different mode.
3. In a city: The density of screens, signage, ambient media, and quiet zones defines whether the default is stimulation or breathing room.

Rage bait environments bias you toward reactive, bandwidth draining states: constant novelty, escalating affect, zero friction.

Curiosity first environments use pacing, framing, and silence to support bandwidth multiplying states.

Interactive Installations as Internal Economy Mirrors

In my practice as a new media artist and technologist, I build installations that function as laboratories for attention economy psychology.

A typical structure might:

1. Offer multiple simultaneous stimuli with different emotional tones.
2. Track where visitors look, move, and linger.
3. Visualize those choices in real time.

The point isn’t to shame people for “bad” attention, but to externalize the internal market:

1. To show what you didn’t see because something else hooked you.
2. To make trade offs visible in space rather than leaving them hidden in your nervous system.

Art in this framing is not just another content stream in the attention economy.

It’s meta infrastructure for revealing how attention itself gets spent.

Design Principles That Push Back on Rage Bait

If you treat yourself as an attention architect, whether you’re a curator, product lead, or artist, some baseline principles emerge:

1. Lead with curiosity, not shock. Use questions, puzzles, and open frames instead of pure provocation.
2. Add friction before high stakes actions. Small pauses, confirmations, or contextual overlays before sharing or replying to inflammatory content.
3. Label emotional bids. Give people language: “This piece is asking for your outrage, envy, fear”. Simple labels can restore a bit of sovereignty.
4. Create bandwidth sanctuaries. Design low noise, high value zones, both physical and digital, where the default is depth, not speed.

The goal isn’t to make things boring.

It’s to align emotional pricing with actual value, not just engagement.

Personal Attention Portfolios

Keep an Emotional Ledger

At the individual level, start with awareness, not willpower.

An emotional ledger is a simple practice:

1. Log what you gave attention to.
2. Note how you felt immediately after.
3. Note how you felt an hour later.
4. Tag the bandwidth cost: light, medium, heavy.

Patterns appear quickly:

1. Certain accounts or topics deliver high arousal, low value spikes.
2. Others are quieter but consistently leave you clearer, calmer, or more energized.

In attention economy psychology terms, the ledger makes invisible micro transactions observable. 

You finally see what you’ve been paying.

Allocate Bandwidth Like an Investment Portfolio

Once you see the pattern, you can manage attention like a portfolio:

1. High volatility assets: Rage bait, doomscrolling, reactive comment wars → Occasionally interesting, mostly draining.
2. Medium risk assets: Curated news, bounded social media, limited-time streams.
3. Blue chip assets: Deep work, slow reading, close relationships, embodied practice, rich art.

You can then:

1. Pre-allocate bandwidth to each category.
2. Set simple rules:
   • Fixed windows for news/social.
   • Device free blocks for blue chip work.
   • Hard caps on high volatility content.

Periodic rebalancing, guided by your emotional ledger keeps your everyday attention closer to how you actually want to feel.

The point is not to become a productivity robot.

The point is to stop running a loss making emotional business.

Collective Emotional Economies and Cultural Stewardship

Attention portfolios also exist at group level:

1. Teams
2. Classrooms
3. Studios
4. Cultural institutions

A space that normalizes constant outrage, interruption, and performance builds a very different cognitive climate than one that normalizes focus, curiosity, and listening.

Curators, educators, and technologists can act as stewards of shared bandwidth by:

1. Rewarding sustained engagement over hot takes.
2. Building interfaces that surface slow stories alongside viral spikes.
3. Setting norms that make disconnecting acceptable rather than suspect.

At scale, these choices define not just what we attend to, but what kinds of emotional worlds we inhabit together.

Conclusion

Rage bait becoming a named cultural phenomenon is not the end of the story; it’s the diagnosis.

Behind every inflammatory clip or viral thread, there’s an internal attention economy:

Emotions bidding for focus, scarcity taxing your bandwidth, and habits automating your choices.

Attention economy psychology maps that system. Attention architecture and interactive art give us tools to change it.

The response can’t be just “have more self-control”.

That’s a losing battle when:

1. Business models reward your worst emotional trades.
2. Scarcity keeps your bandwidth permanently low.
3. Interfaces are engineered to bypass deliberation.

We need structural counter design:

1. Interfaces and environments that slow down high-arousal loops.
2. Cultural programs that surface meta-awareness of attention, not just demand more of it.
3. Personal routines that manage attention like an emotional portfolio, not an infinite resource.

For institutions and curators, that means commissioning experiences that don’t just compete for attention but interrogate how attention works. 

For product teams and individuals, it means shifting from endless willpower wars to redesigning defaults.

Your attention is already an economy. The only real question is: 

Are you running it, or is someone else?

If you want to explore this further; through an installation, a workshop, or strategic design, I treat this framework as a blueprint for collaboration, not a closed theory.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)