Thomas Gilovich

Thomas Gilovich

Thomas Gilovich is a psychologist at Cornell University and an author of the 2000 paper that named the spotlight effect, with Victoria Husted Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky.

Who they are

Gilovich appears as an author across the spotlight effect papers: the 2000 paper, the 2001 paper with Kenneth Savitsky and Nicholas Epley on how harshly others judge failures, shortcomings and mishaps, and the 2002 paper with Justin Kruger and Victoria Husted Medvec on how much others register variation in a person's actions and appearance. This page rests on those papers and does not cover his wider career.

Key papers

Key ideas

What the 2000 paper proposed

The paper proposed that people overestimate how noticeable their own actions and appearance are to others. Its experiments compared a person's estimate of how many others noticed something with the share who reported noticing it. Wearers of a T-shirt expected about half a room to remember it, and fewer than a quarter did. See Spotlight Effect.

Sources

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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