Cognitive biases
The spotlight effect: why it feels like everyone is looking at us
Vera is late for the first class of a course. The only clean thing she has left is a joke gift: a T-shirt with a huge cartoon chicken in sunglasses. There are 20 people in the room. Vera walks across the whole room to a free chair and spends the whole evening thinking: “Everyone saw that chicken. Everyone will remember.” And at the next class it turns out that fewer people remembered her T-shirt than she thought.
This is the spotlight effect: we feel that others notice our appearance and our actions more than they really do. As if a beam of light were pointed at us and the whole room were looking only there. In fact, people are busy with their own things, and the beam is not so bright.
Below, we look at what research has shown, where this feeling comes from, and how to deal with it. In the middle of the article you will take Vera’s place and decide for yourself how many people will notice her T-shirt.
Contents
In short: how the spotlight effect works
What the spotlight effect is
The effect was studied by the American psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues. In a 2000 paper they described a series of experiments. A participant was asked to put on a T-shirt with a picture that is embarrassing to wear and to show up in it in front of other people. Then he was asked: how many of the people who saw you will be able to recall what was printed on the T-shirt? And the observers were tested too: who actually remembered.
The estimates turned out to be too high. The people wearing the T-shirt thought more people would remember the picture than actually did. Interestingly, the same happened with a T-shirt whose picture the participants liked. So it is not only about embarrassment. We generally overestimate how noticeable we are.
In another experiment in the same paper, people discussed something in a group. Afterward, each person rated how well the others remembered their good and bad remarks. Again, participants thought their words were more noticeable than they turned out to be for others. And that held for both bad remarks and good ones.
Something similar was found with changes in appearance. In a 2010 study, a person changed into a different sweater during the experiment. Afterward, he thought that more people had noticed the change than actually had.
How reliable is the effect? It has been found in several experiments by different authors. But we did not find large replication studies, as exist for some other biases. So the honest way to put it is this: the direction of the effect is clear, and how strong it is depends on the situation.
Try it yourself: Vera’s T-shirt
The game takes a minute. Here is what will happen.
Step 1. You are in Vera’s place: you walk into a room in the chicken T-shirt, where 20 people are sitting. Move the slider: how many of them will later remember what was printed on your T-shirt? The little figures in the room will turn toward you as you move it.
Step 2. The same scene, but someone else walks in instead of you: the same room, the same 20 people, the same T-shirt. You move the slider again: how many people will remember their T-shirt?
Step 3. We will show both answers side by side and tell you what the researchers found.
Why two steps? The game cannot check how many people would really have remembered your T-shirt: there is no real room. Instead, the game will ask you to rate two similar scenes. What it makes of that, we will tell you at the end. The slider is empty at first, so that it does not suggest any number to you.
What usually happens. In the T-shirt experiments, people expected more observers to remember the picture than actually did. If you put down more people for yourself than for another person in the same T-shirt, that looks like the spotlight effect seen from the inside. We came up with this comparison for the game: the researchers asked real observers.
What the game cannot show. An imaginary T-shirt is less embarrassing than a real one. So in the game the effect may not show up. That does not mean you do not have it in life.
Why it feels like everyone is looking
Picture a stage with a spotlight on it. An actor in the beam can barely see the audience and will easily believe that every eye is fixed on him. Meanwhile, in the audience, one person reads the program, another whispers to a neighbor, another thinks about something else. This is an image, not an exact description of how the mind works, but it conveys the main point well.
We start from ourselves. The authors of the 2000 paper explain the effect this way. We experience our own situation very vividly: we feel every wrinkle, we remember the stain, we hear our own slip. To work out what others see, we take this vivid feeling as a starting point and try to correct for it. But we correct too little. The anchoring effect works in a similar way: the first number pulls the next estimate toward itself.
We stop early. According to another study, when we imagine what another person sees, we move away from our own view step by step. And we stop as soon as the answer seems plausible. When we are in a hurry, we move away even less. These experiments are about how we imagine another person’s view in general, not specifically about T-shirts. But they explain well why the correction comes out small.
We don’t see what others are busy with. When something awkward happens to us, we think only about that. But observers also see a lot of other things: the surroundings, their own business, the other people. The authors of one more paper write about this. Because of it, we expect to be judged more harshly than we actually are.
Where it gets in the way
Appearance. A pimple, a bad haircut, an old jacket. It seems that everyone sees them and everyone is thinking about them. A person turns down an invitation or hides in a corner all evening. Meanwhile others most likely noticed less than it seems to them.
Mistakes in public. A slip in a presentation, a wrong answer in class, a stumble on the street. Researchers tested such cases: people imagined awkward situations, or really did badly on a task in front of others. They thought others would think worse of them than others actually did. The authors write that such fears can add extra anxiety in social situations.
Conversations and meetings. You feel that an awkward phrase at a meeting stuck in everyone’s memory. Most likely it didn’t. But there is a flip side: a good idea was also remembered by fewer people than you think. So it is better to repeat or write down what matters, rather than hope that “everyone noticed anyway.”
When it is not a mistake. Sometimes we are noticed more than we think. This happens with things we cannot feel ourselves. In a 2022 paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed in a journal, participants underestimated how much others would notice their own smell. A person notices their own smell poorly. The spotlight shines brightly where we can see ourselves well.
How to step out of the spotlight
If awkwardness around people is so strong that you avoid meetings, public speaking, or work, it is worth talking to a professional about it.
The spotlight effect is one of the biases on the cognitive bias map, in the section on how we judge people and ourselves. Next to it is the halo effect: how one noticeable trait changes the impression of a person.
Frequently asked questions
So does nobody look at me at all?
No. People do notice us, just less than it seems to us. The spotlight effect is not “nobody sees,” but “they see less than I think.”
Is this the same as the illusion of transparency?
They are close but different. They are described together by Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky. The spotlight effect is about what is visible from the outside: clothes, actions, words. The illusion of transparency is about what is inside: we feel that others easily notice our nervousness or irritation.
Is the spotlight effect only about embarrassing things?
No. In the experiments, the same thing happened with a T-shirt that the participants liked, and with both good and bad remarks in a group discussion. We tend to think we stand out more than we do in both directions, not only when we are embarrassed.
