Why do we feel like we stand out more than we really do?

The Spotlight Effect

, explained.
Bias

What is the Spotlight Effect?

The spotlight effect describes how people tend to believe that others are paying more attention to them than they actually are—in other words, our tendency to always feel like we are “in the spotlight.” This bias shows up frequently in our day-to-day lives, both in positive situations (like when we nail a presentation and overestimate how impressed all our co-workers must be) and in negative ones (like when we bomb the presentation and feel like everybody must be laughing about it behind our backs).

A drawing of a group of stick figures with one figure standing under a bright spotlight, emphasizing their importance or focus.

Where this bias occurs

Let’s say you go to a party at your friend’s house, and you end up spilling some of your drink on your shirt. As you make your way to the bathroom to clean yourself up, you feel like everybody at the party is watching you make a fool of yourself, and you’re incredibly embarrassed. However, a few weeks after the party, when you bring it up with your friends, nobody else even remembers the incident. Even though you felt like the center of attention at the time, you really weren’t. Everyone else was too busy worrying about how they were being scrutinized—perhaps cringing over an awkward comment they made to a friend, regretting the bold shirt they chose to wear, or wondering if they were snacking too much. We’re all walking around in our little spotlights, which’re, most of the time, only visible to us.

Sources

  1. Brown, M. A., & Stopa, L. (2007). The spotlight effect and the illusion of transparency in social anxiety. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 21(6), 804-819. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.11.006
  2. Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279-301. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(77)90049-x
  3. Lovallo, D., & Kahneman, D. (2003, July). Delusions of success: How optimism undermines executives’ decisions. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2003/07/delusions-of-success-how-optimism-undermines-executives-decisions
  4. Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2006). Tom Sawyer and the construction of value. The Construction of Preference, 60, 271-281. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511618031.015
  5. 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. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211
  6. Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 332-346. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.2.332
  7. Crosby, J. R., King, M., & Savitsky, K. (2014). The minority spotlight effect. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(7), 743-750. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614527625
  8. Bendix, A. (2015, October 15). It's Time to Ditch the Stigma of Doing Things Alone. Bloomberg CityLab. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-15/why-more-people-are-eating-and-traveling-alone
  9. 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(2), 93–99. https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.2001.1490 
  10. Busch, C. A., Wiesenthal, N. J., Mohammed, T. F., Anderson, S., Barstow, M., Custalow, C., Gajewski, J., Garcia, K., Gilabert, C. K., Hughes, J., Jenkins, A., Johnson, M., Kasper, C., Perez, I., Robnett, B., Tillett, K., Tsefrekas, L., Goodwin, E. C., & Cooper, K. M. (2023). The Disproportionate Impact of Fear of Negative Evaluation on First-Generation College Students, LGBTQ+ Students, and Students with Disabilities in College Science Courses. CBE life sciences education, 22(3), ar31. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.22-10-0195
  11. Westrich, H. (2022, April 27). Consumerism and the spotlight effect: How our minds convince us to spend. CogBlog – A Cognitive Psychology Blog. https://web.colby.edu/cogblog/2022/04/27/consumerism-and-the-spotlight-effect-how-our-minds-convince-us-to-spend/ 
  12. Samuel, S. (2024). People are falling in love with — and getting addicted to — AI voices. Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/367188/love-addicted-ai-voice-human-gpt4-emotion 
  13. Hall, M. J. (2024). Embracing the spotlight (effect): How attention received online influences consumers’ offline spotlight biases. Marketing Letters, 35(1), 45–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-023-09685-4

About the Authors

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Dan Pilat

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

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Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. A decision scientist with a PhD in Decision Neuroscience from McGill University, Sekoul's work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at conferences around the world. Sekoul previously advised management on innovation and engagement strategy at The Boston Consulting Group as well as on online media strategy at Google. He has a deep interest in the applications of behavioral science to new technology and has published on these topics in places such as the Huffington Post and Strategy & Business.

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