Victoria Husted Medvec

Victoria Husted Medvec

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

Who they are

Medvec is listed as second author of the 2000 paper and as an author of the 2002 follow-up with Thomas Gilovich and Justin Kruger. This page rests on those two papers. Her affiliation and wider career have not been checked against a source here, and no claim is made about them.

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, and tested it by comparing estimates with what observers reported. 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. 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