Does the public accurately perceive how views change in society? Prevailing narratives suggest not, but we argue this conclusion stems from searching for the wrong kind of accuracy—demanding pollster-like precision instead of acknowledging the public’s robust perception of the ‘gist’ of change. Re-analyzing three large studies (total N = 2,236), we show that collective perceptions of change are incredibly consistent across different measurement methods (r > 0.90) and, critically, are highly aligned with actual historical data (r > 0.70). This collective wisdom is underpinned by a robust, individual-level ability to perceive the direction and relative force of these shifts. Moreover, there is a clear pattern to the minority of attitudes for which perceptions of change were inaccurate. We conclude that the public possesses a robust gist-based judgment that accurately tracks how various political attitudes have changed.

This paper explores whether consciousness can exist without attention. This is ahot topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science due to the popularity oftheories that hold attention to be necessary for consciousness. The discovery ofa form of consciousness that exists without the influence of attention wouldrequire a change in the way that many global workspace theorists, for example,understand the role and function of consciousness. Against this understanding,at least three forms of consciousness have been argued to exist withoutattention: perceptual gist, imagistic consciousness, and phenomenalconsciousness. After first arguing that the evidence is inconclusive on thequestion of whether these forms of consciousness exist without attention, I herepresent a fourth form of consciousness that is likely to be more successful:conscious entrainment. I argue that conscious entrainment is a form ofconsciousness associated with skilled behavior in which attention is sometimesabsent.