Imagine that you are standing on a stage in complete darkness - and suddenly the light of the spotlights turns on: all the attention of the audience is directed exactly to you.
In real life, such a situation does not even have to be imagined, because most people already believe that at times others only look at them. Read about what the spotlight effect is and what people really think about your appearance on our blog.
In a normal situation, a person directs his attention to himself: to his thoughts and feelings, deeds, appearance, achievements and failures. If a person's appearance undergoes some changes (for example, he or she first comes to work with a new haircut or in a beautiful dress), then it seems to him that these changes are noticed and appreciated by everyone around. This creates a "spotlight effect" - a cognitive distortion that makes us believe that people around us are paying more attention to us than they actually are.
The "spotlight effect" was first described by one of the most prominent researchers of cognitive biases - professor at Cornell University Thomas Gilovich (Thomas Gilovich). Despite the fact that Gilovich has been studying the perception of social assessment for a long time (at least since the late 1980s), for the first time this cognitive distortion was named by him in this way in a work published only in 2000.
In a study he conducted with fellow students, participants were asked to come to lectures wearing Barry Manilow T-shirts. Manilow is an American pop singer, and wearing a T-shirt with a photo of him in the late 1990s as a student in America is like confessing sympathy for Philip Kirkorov as a student in Russia in the early 2010s. The authors of the work themselves described Manilow as "a musician who is not terribly popular with college students." Students (who were clearly uncomfortable) were sent to class, then asked how many people in the classroom they thought would notice that they had Manilow on their T-shirt, and then compared their answers with real numbers.
The researchers assumed that the study participants would find their t-shirts with such an odious figure prominent; in fact, they overestimated the attention of those around them by 23 percent. The same thing happened when participants were asked to wear T-shirts featuring the then more popular personalities (Martin Luther King, Bob Marley and Jerry Seinfeld): this time attention was overrated by 40 percent.
In his subsequent research, Gilovich also evaluated how people's opinions on how others assess their appearance and achievements differ from the real assessment. It turned out to be strong: others did not notice changes in the appearance or performance of others as often as they themselves thought.
Of course, the attention of other people to oneself is not always overestimated, but only if a person believes that something has changed in his appearance, behavior or achievements. In general, like most cognitive biases, it's okay to overestimate people's attention to themselves (especially when there are significant changes). Nevertheless, there is also a "pathological" stage of such behavior, and it is this stage that underlies social anxiety (what is also called 'social anxiety' in the English-language literature): a person who seriously believes that all the attention of people around is directed to him, at some point begins to avoid him.
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They associate the "spotlight effect" with another, slightly less studied cognitive distortion - the "false consensus effect", which consists in the fact that people tend to attribute their opinions to everyone around: in other words, according to a person, others often think in the same way as and he himself. That is why the "spotlight effect" can have both negative and positive sides, but at the same time it always relies on its own opinion about oneself.
For every person, he himself and what he does is naturally in the center of attention. But, of course, this does not mean that other people look only at him and think only about him. Others have enough worries of their own (and their main concern is themselves and everything connected with them), so believing that they would rather condemn you than ignore is a bad way to recognize the state of other people. This, like another cognitive distortion - the "curse of knowledge", can be explained by a violation of understanding of the work of someone else's mental state.
Therefore, if you still really want to wear a T-shirt with Philip Kirkorov (or someone else), then do it boldly: most of those around you will not care. Unless, of course, it breaks the dress code in your office.
Author: Elizaveta Ivtushok