Why we should worry about the recent decline of reading, according to science

Last year, various surveys, including reliable indicators, have highlighted a significant decline in reading habits over the past decades.

The most striking evidence is not simply that people read less, but that their capacity for deep reading is weakening. According to OECD data, the proportion of 15-year-olds who fail to reach minimum reading proficiency has now risen to nearly one in four across advanced economies, with sharp declines in tasks requiring inference, evaluation, and integration of information across texts.

In the United States, NAEP scores show that average reading performance among 13-year-olds has fallen to its lowest level in decades, reversing long-standing gains. Laboratory studies mirror these trends: experiments comparing print and screen reading consistently find that readers of digital texts score 10–30% lower on comprehension and recall, particularly for longer and conceptually demanding material.

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Eye-tracking and cognitive load research further indicates that frequent digital readers engage in more skimming, less rereading, and shallower semantic processing. Crucially, these effects are not confined to weaker readers. Even highly educated adults now report shorter attention spans for long-form text and greater mental fatigue when reading complex arguments, suggesting that the decline of reading reflects not a loss of literacy, but an erosion of the cognitive endurance and attentional discipline that deep reading uniquely develops.

Not just children

To make matters worse, various robust data indicators show that adults are spending less time reading, especially for pleasure. For instance:

(1) A large time-use study analyzing diary data from over 236,000 Americans found that the share of adults who read for pleasure on an average day dropped from about 28% in 2003 to just 16% in 2023, a roughly 40% decline over two decades.

(2) That same research showed a steady annual fall of about 3% per year in the prevalence of daily leisure reading among U.S. adults.

(3) An earlier report by the World Economic Forum indicated average daily reading time in the U.S. declined from about 23 minutes per day in 2004 to around 16 minutes by 2019, even before the most recent decade’s drop.

(4) In the U.S., fewer adults now report reading books for pleasure: about 48.5% of adults said they read at least one book in the past year in 2022, down from 54.6% in 2012.

A real concern?

Should this really concern us? Perhaps not. After all, reading is just one medium through which humans have ingested information and exercised their minds, including for deep thinking. For most of history, knowledge travelled orally rather than silently on the page. Ancient cultures relied on storytelling, poetry, and song to preserve and transmit complex ideas: Homer’s epics were memorized and performed long before they were written down; Greek philosophy unfolded through dialogue rather than textbooks; and entire moral, legal, and scientific traditions were passed across generations through ritualized speech, music, and debate. From this perspective, the book is a relatively recent cognitive technology, not an eternal prerequisite for intelligence (consider that Socrates and his fellow philosophers were concerned by the invention of writing, thinking it may atrophy memory).

And today, once again, new media promise alternative routes to learning and thinking: immersive simulations, virtual and augmented reality, AI tutors, and even speculative neuro-technologies all claim to enhance understanding, creativity, or memory without requiring sustained reading at all. Perhaps these tools will indeed make us more knowledgeable or even smarter. Needless to say, not all reading is cognitively ennobling. Wading through a disposable airport romcom is unlikely to stretch the mind more than an unscripted, curious conversation with a stranger at a bar. The real question, then, is not whether reading is declining per se, but whether whatever replaces it can cultivate the same depth of attention, reflection, and intellectual effort that serious reading has historically demanded.

Digital diversions

To be sure, every person is different and even among those who are reading less, former reading time may be recycled or reutilized in many different ways. That said, there is a clear trend to devote more time and attention to the very technologies that have increasingly monopolized our focus over the past two decades. Time-use and media-consumption data strongly suggest that leisure reading has been displaced not by other cognitively demanding activities, but by screen-based media. In the United States, Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use surveys show that average daily reading for pleasure fell from about 23 minutes in the early 2000s to roughly 16 minutes by 2019, while time spent on digital devices and television increased steadily. Over the same period, social media use expanded rapidly: Pew Research Center reports that adult social media adoption rose from around 5% in 2005 to over 80%, with many users spending multiple hours per day on these platforms. Globally, Digital 2024 data indicate that adults now spend about 2.5 hours per day on social media and more than 6.5 hours per day consuming digital media overall, compared with a small and declining fraction of time devoted to reading books or long-form text.

While time spent reading traditional text has declined, many adults are substituting other sustained listening activities that share some cognitive benefits of reading; for example, Edison Research’s Infinite Dial reports that the share of Americans ages 12 and older who listen to podcasts weekly has grown from about 11% in 2013 to over 60% in 2024, with average weekly listening around seven hours, suggesting deeper engagement than typical short-form scrolling. Audiobook consumption has also risen sharply: the Audiobook Publishers Association and APA Foundation data show that nearly 50% of American adults listened to an audiobook in the past year, with frequent listeners averaging more than 6 hours per week, offering another way to engage with complex narrative and informational content. These trends indicate that although reading declines are real, listening to long-form spoken content (whether through podcasts or audiobooks) is increasingly filling part of the gap, providing extended attention to ideas, storytelling, and analysis in ways that resemble some of reading’s cognitive and reflective benefits.

Unique benefits

And yet, cognitive and developmental psychology remind us of the distinctive benefits of traditional reading, especially when it comes to thoughtful immersion and deep processing of text. Decades of research converge on at least five lessons worth remembering.

First, sustained reading strengthens attention and cognitive endurance, training the ability to concentrate for extended periods without external stimulation, a capacity that is closely linked to academic achievement and complex problem-solving.

Second, reading supports deeper comprehension and critical thinking: compared with fragmented or audiovisual media, linear text promotes inferential reasoning, abstraction, and the integration of ideas across time.

Third, regular reading expands vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, which in turn predicts reasoning ability (especially verbal and crystallized intelligence), learning speed, and even long-term occupational outcomes.

Fourth, reading fiction in particular has been shown to enhance perspective-taking and social cognition, improving people’s ability to understand others’ emotions, intentions, and mental states.

Finally, early and sustained exposure to reading plays a foundational role in brain development, literacy, and self-regulation, with long-lasting effects on educational attainment and cognitive resilience across the lifespan.

None of this means that reading is the only route to thinking, or that newer media are inherently inferior, but it does suggest that some cognitive benefits are unusually hard to replicate without sustained engagement with text.

And if you made it this far, thank you for reading this.

source https://www.fastcompany.com/91471437/reading-decline-why-we-should-worry-science