What is the spotlight effect?
The spotlight effect is the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice your actions and appearance. A 2000 experiment counted what a room remembered, and later studies tested whether the estimate can be lowered.
Answer to the question
What is the spotlight effect?
The spotlight effect is the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice your actions and appearance. In later accounts of a 2000 experiment, students wearing a T-shirt they would rather not be seen in expected about half the room to remember it, and fewer than a quarter did.
Key takeaways
- Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky (2000), as later accounts describe it: wearers of a shirt that students would rather not wear expected about half the room to remember it, and fewer than a quarter did.
- A shirt showing someone the students admired produced the same kind of gap, with later accounts putting recall at fewer than one in ten, so the effect does not depend on embarrassment.
- In a group discussion, members exaggerated how noticeable both their good remarks and their weak ones were.
- Wearers who had spent about fifteen minutes in the shirt before meeting a group gave lower estimates, which later authors read as habituation.
- Boothby and colleagues (2018) found people underestimated how much new conversation partners liked them, and among first-year hall mates the gap lasted for months.
Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky named the spotlight effect in a 2000 paper whose title calls it an egocentric bias in estimates of how noticeable one's actions and appearance are. Wearers of an embarrassing shirt and of a flattering one, and members of a group discussion, all overestimated how much others registered, and the abstract explains the pattern as anchoring on one's own view and adjusting too little toward the room's.
The Shirt Experiment, Counted
Adam Alter retells the experiment in Irresistible. College students put on the shirt, walked into a room of other students, and after a few minutes were led out and asked how many of the others had noticed it. In Alter's account the wearers had thought about the shirt the whole time, so it felt as obvious to the room as it did to them. The students in the room had been completing questionnaires, and their recall supplied the count to set against the guess.
Later accounts of the study put numbers on the gap. Wearers of a T-shirt that a pre-test had marked as one students would rather not be seen in expected about half the room to notice it, a figure a Psychology Today post by Allen McConnell gives, and a 2016 paper by Macrae and colleagues reports that fewer than a quarter did. Salience, how readily something stands out to an observer, comes in two versions here: the one the wearer imagines and the one the observers report. The two did not match.
A second version used a shirt showing someone the students admired. The wearers again expected more of the room to remember it than did, and the 2016 paper puts the share who actually noticed it at fewer than one in ten. Because the flattering shirt produced the same kind of gap, the spotlight effect does not hinge on embarrassment. It follows how conspicuous a person feels, for whatever reason.
Standing out is the other face of fitting in, a tension that Why Do We Buy to Fit In and Stand Out follows through everyday purchases. The shirt experiments measure only the standing-out side, and they show that the felt version runs well ahead of the observed one.
Appearance and actions both appear in the paper's title, so the spotlight effect was tested in speech as well as in dress. In a further experiment, members of a group discussion judged how memorable their own contributions would be to the rest of the group. They exaggerated how noticeable both their good remarks and their weak ones were.
One variation changed how long the wearer had been in the shirt. In the 2016 authors' description of the 2000 work, participants who had worn it for about fifteen minutes before meeting a group gave lower estimates of how many people would notice. Those authors read the drop as habituation, the ordinary process by which a repeated sight stops drawing a reaction. The wearer, not the room, had grown used to the shirt, and the spotlight effect eased as the estimate came down with it.
Follow-Ups, and Whether the Spotlight Can Be Dimmed
The 2000 paper was the first of several on the same family of errors, by its authors and by others.
1. 2000, Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky name the spotlight effect, for actions and appearance.
2. 2001, Savitsky, Epley and Gilovich ask whether others judge failures as harshly as people expect.
3. 2002, Gilovich, Kruger and Medvec turn to how much others register the ups and downs in a person.
4. 2016, Macrae and colleagues ask whether the effect can be reduced.
5. 2018, Boothby and colleagues compare how much people expect to be liked with how much they are.
A 2001 paper by Savitsky, Gilovich and a third co-author asked whether people overestimate how harshly others judge their failures, shortcomings and mishaps. Erica Boothby and colleagues cite it for the finding that people overestimate how harshly others will judge them in social interactions.
The Spotlight Effect Revisited, by Gilovich, Medvec and a colleague in 2002, turned to the manifest variability of actions and appearance, meaning how much others register the ups and downs in how a person performs or looks. Its title reports the same direction of error.
Whether the effect can be turned down was the question in a 2016 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Its three experiments looked at the version that arises before an event, when a person pictures being noticed later. Imagining an event in the far future reduced the spotlighting. Picturing an upcoming event from a third-person viewpoint reduced both the spotlighting and the embarrassment, and the authors conclude that a small shift in visual perspective may lessen the sense of being personally salient.
Alter applies the spotlight effect to social media. A photo that attracts only a few likes, he writes, is a little like the shirt: its owner assumes other users are staring at it, when they are more concerned with their own photos and with the stream of photos before and after. His account is an application of the research, offered for readers who post, and the experiment itself involved a room, not a feed.
Guessing About Being Liked
The same pattern carries from what others notice to what they feel in the liking gap, reported in Psychological Science in 2018 by Erica Boothby and three co-authors. After conversations with new people, participants underestimated how much their partners liked them and enjoyed their company. The authors call this the liking gap.
In each set of studies a person forecasts what the other side thinks, and the other side's own report is set against the forecast. In the spotlight effect studies the other side was less attentive than the forecast. In the liking gap studies the other side was warmer than the forecast. The spotlight effect and the liking gap sit before the motive to be accepted, the subject of Why Do We Need to Belong, and before what ostracism and conformity do to it, traced in The Invisible Weight of Belonging, because they concern how accurately a person reads the audience that could grant acceptance.
The liking gap appeared among strangers meeting in a laboratory, among first-year students living in the same hall and among members of the public at a personal development workshop. It held across conversations of different lengths, and among the students in the halls it persisted for months as they formed new relationships.
Common questions
What is the spotlight effect?
The spotlight effect is the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice your actions and appearance. Later accounts of the 2000 study report that wearers of an embarrassing T-shirt expected about half a room to remember it, and fewer than a quarter did.
Does the spotlight effect only apply to embarrassing things?
No. In the 2000 paper, wearers of a shirt showing someone the students admired also expected more people to remember it than did, and later accounts put the share who did at fewer than one in ten.
Does the spotlight effect fade?
In one variation described by later authors, participants who had worn the shirt for about fifteen minutes before meeting a group gave lower estimates of how many people would notice it. Those authors read this as habituation.
Sources
Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Seed book; vault hub Books/Irresistible.
Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). “The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211-222. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211
Savitsky, K., Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2001). “Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures, shortcomings, and mishaps.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 44-56. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.1.44 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.1.44
Gilovich, T., Kruger, J., & Medvec, V. H. (2002). “The spotlight effect revisited: Overestimating the manifest variability of our actions and appearance.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38(1), 93-99. doi:10.1006/jesp.2001.1490 https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.2001.1490
Macrae, C. N., Mitchell, J. P., McNamara, D. L., Golubickis, M., Andreou, K., Moller, S., Peytcheva, K., Falben, J. K., & Christian, B. M. (2016). “Noticing future me: Reducing egocentrism through mental imagery.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(7), 855-863. doi:10.1177/0146167216644961 https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167216644961
Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., & Clark, M. S. (2018). “The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think?” Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742-1756. doi:10.1177/0956797618783714 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714