Garriy Shteynberg
Garriy Shteynberg is a social psychologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the researcher who built shared attention into a formal psychological construct. His work is the main body of evidence behind the claim that experiencing something in the knowledge that others are experiencing it at the same time changes how it is processed and felt. That claim is real, and it is narrower than the way it usually travels. His amplification effects are largely on self-reported emotion under mediated co-presence, which is not the same thing as a measurable boost to attention or memory in a room full of people.
Who they are
Shteynberg took his doctorate in psychology at the University of Maryland and holds a master's in social and cultural anthropology from Oxford. He works in the psychology department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where the through line of his research is what he calls the collective mind: the idea that human beings do not simply attend to the world, they attend to it aware that specific others are attending to the same thing, and that this awareness is a distinct psychological state with consequences of its own.
Shared attention is the operational core of that programme, developed over more than a decade from his dissertation onward. The proposal is that co-attention changes memory, affect, motivation, judgement and behaviour, and it is genuinely a proposal about psychology rather than about sociology or crowds: the other person does not need to be visible, or audible, or to do anything, so long as the participant believes attention is being shared. That design choice is what makes the work experimentally tractable, and it is also what limits how far the results can be carried.
The limit deserves stating carefully, because this site relies on the distinction. The strongest and most replicated part of his amplification story concerns what people report feeling, under conditions where the sharing is signalled rather than physically present. The best objective-measure test of the neighbouring claim, Noam Mairon and colleagues in 2020, put two people at the same table looking at the same screen, measured attention and memory behaviourally and with EEG, and found no amplification at all, with Bayes factors supporting the null. Those two results are not in direct contradiction. They test different things: felt experience under mediated sharing on one side, objective performance under physical co-presence on the other. Popular writing treats them as one literature, and that is where the overreach happens.
Where we come down: both sides stand. Shteynberg's findings are the reason it is reasonable to think shared experience feels different, and this publication does not dismiss self-report as second-class evidence about feeling, which is the thing being asked about. Mairon's null is the reason it is not reasonable to claim that a shared audience attends better or remembers more. When this site says a stadium is doing something to people, it is making a claim in Shteynberg's territory, about experience, and not in the territory where the objective measures have already returned a null. No effect size is quoted here for his work, because none was available in the sources consulted, and an unsourced number would be worse than no number.
Key papers
Shteynberg, G. (2015), "Shared Attention," Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 579-590. The theoretical statement of shared attention as a mental state, with its properties and its cognitive, affective and behavioural consequences. This is the paper to cite when the construct itself is at issue.
His empirical output on shared attention and the collective mind is considerably larger than this, spread across social psychology and adjacent fields. Only the paper verified against the source is listed.
Key ideas
Shared attention is a mental state, not a description of a crowd. What matters is the belief that specific others are attending to the same thing at the same time.
The collective mind: attending together is proposed as a distinct mode of human cognition rather than as ordinary attention with company.
The demonstrated amplification effects are largely on self-reported emotion, and largely under mediated rather than physically co-present sharing.
His work and the objective-measure null are compatible. They measure different outcomes, and conflating them is the most common error in popular writing on crowds and simultaneity.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
The Scholar profile is listed by him on his own Social Psychology Network page and states his joint Tennessee chair in psychology and marketing. The X handle he listed there has since been taken over by a memecoin account, so it was not recorded, and no Bluesky or LinkedIn account could be confirmed
Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Shteynberg, G. (2015), "Shared Attention," Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 579-590.
- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, psychology department page and Shteynberg's own site. Affiliation, training and the description of the shared-attention research programme.
- Mairon, N., Nahum, M., Stolk, A., Knight, R. T. & Perry, A. (2020), "Behavioral and EEG Measures Show no Amplifying Effects of Shared Attention on Attention or Memory," Scientific Reports, 10, 8458. The objective-measure null, and its authors' statement that it is not a direct replication of the mediated-co-presence findings.