The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance
Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky's 2000 paper names the spotlight effect, an egocentric bias in estimates of how noticeable one's own actions and appearance are. The abstract confirms the qualitative pattern only. As described by later sources, students wearing a T-shirt that others would rather not wear expected about half of a room of students to remember it, and fewer than a quarter could. A shirt showing a figure the students admired produced the same kind of overestimate, with fewer than one in ten remembering it. Group-discussion members overestimated how noticeable their own good and poor contributions were, and wearers who had spent about fifteen minutes in the shirt before meeting a group gave lower estimates. Used in the article at the level of those descriptions, with figures rounded.
Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky's 2000 paper names the spotlight effect, an egocentric bias in estimates of how noticeable one's own actions and appearance are. The abstract confirms the qualitative pattern only. As described by later sources, students wearing a T-shirt that others would rather not wear expected about half of a room of students to remember it, and fewer than a quarter could. A shirt showing a figure the students admired produced the same kind of overestimate, with fewer than one in ten remembering it. Group-discussion members overestimated how noticeable their own good and poor contributions were, and wearers who had spent about fifteen minutes in the shirt before meeting a group gave lower estimates. Used in the article at the level of those descriptions, with figures rounded.
Written from the europe PMC abstract of the 2000 paper (qualitative results only: embarrassing and flattering shirts, group discussion, anchoring and adjustment; no figures), Crossref record, a Psychology Today blog post by Allen R. McConnell (2009), and the manuscript of a 2016 paper that describes the 2000 experiments, read 2026-11-01. The full text was not available.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
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