Whenever I find myself telling family and friends an interesting tidbit from psychology I find I am referring to this or that ‘effect’. Psychology is littered with such ‘effects’, like the bystander effect, the halo effect, the placebo effect…and now here’s the spotlight effect. This is the paranoia that we all experience when we do something stupid — you feel as though everyone is watching you and experience an intense sense of stupidity or shame. But did anyone actually notice?
Thomas Gilovich and colleagues from Cornell University in America tested the effect. Gilovich et al. arranged for some psychology undergraduates to turn up for a lab class wearing a T-shirt featuring a picture of Barry Manilow (a singer whose picture was meant to be an embarrassment). The student was later asked to estimate how many other people had noticed what they were wearing. The researchers found that participants overestimated the number of other students who noticed the embarrassing T-shirt. In fact, they estimated about twice the real number. In other words, their own embarrassment led them to overestimate how noticeable the T-shirt was.
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