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spotlight effect
You overestimate how much people notice your minor behaviors.
The spotlight effect is your tendency to feel that your actions are being observed by everyone.
Gilovich's work found that you are the center of your own universe, so you assume you are the center of everyone else's. While you fixate on your small mistakes or your specific choices, others are generally preoccupied with their own lives. You perceive a level of scrutiny that simply does not exist in reality.
You are far less interesting to others than you feel.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Thomas Gilovich, 2000
- What the check found
- The definition is accurate to established psychological literature, and the attribution to Gilovich (2000) is correct, though the language used in the claim is slightly hyperbolic.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.