Survey researchers have long known that respondents often fail to pay close attention to surveys. Instead of expending the cognitive effort to interpret the question, mentally search for information, integrate information into a single judgment, and translate the judgment into a response option (Tourangeau & Rasinski, 1998), people take mental short-cuts to minimize the amount of effort to answer a question (Krosnick, 1991, 1999). This tendency is an especially significant concern for internet-based surveys because there is no interviewer present to monitor the quality of answers to survey questions.

Recently, psychologists (e.g., Oppenheimer et al, 2009) have advanced the use of screener questions - questions that are formatted as typical survey questions, but require closely reading instructions to answer correctly - as a way to monitor respondent effort. For example a screener question may at first appear to be asking a respondent about his/her favorite sports teams, but then instruct the respondent to ignore all of the response options and check "none of the above." These questions can serve as a general measure of attentiveness to the survey questions and response instruction.

In our paper, we develop and employ standard screener questions as a method to both gauge and stimulate respondent attentiveness. We then evaluate both the incidence of attentiveness and its effects on the measurement of social and political attitudes.