The Spotlight Effect

Ever feel like everyone in the Zoom call is looking at you? Ever astonished to find your contribution to a project goes unrecognized, or that your latest faux pas didn’t destroy you? Perhaps you’re not the central character in this narrative after all. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the spotlight effect and what it teaches us about our own perception of reality and those around us.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everyone. This is Seth the audio producer for Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. And there's just a quick note
before we start. Myself, Robert, and Joe. We are still
recording in isolation because it is the summer of and well,
this episode, we had a bit of a problem with
Robert's microphone. It was a one time thing. It shouldn't
happen again in the future, but for this episode, it's

(00:27):
going to sound a little bit like Joe is kind
of talking to a tv VCR combo and like a
bunker somewhere. But well, I guess that's technically kind of
what we're actually doing. But anyway, anyway, point is this
is a one time incident. Uh, it's all still very understandable,
very easy to listen to in this episode of cleaned

(00:48):
it up as best I can, and next time it'll
sound just like normal, we promise. Thanks, enjoy the show.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind Production. If I
heart radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

(01:09):
My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. In
Today we're gonna be talking about mostly focusing on a
classic psychology paper about an effect in uh in the
kind of social cognitive bias known as the spotlight effect.
But to get into this subject, I wanted to start
off by thinking about something that a lot of people

(01:30):
have found themselves doing in the past few months. Of
people who maybe this wasn't part of your job very
much recently, but now you spend a significant portion of
your day in web video meetings, staring at little boxes
of your co workers faces on a computer screen, or
maybe just staring at your own face a lot. Yes, uh,

(01:53):
I mean, in fact, right now is Joe and I
are recording this. We are using a Zoom call. We
are using a Zoom conference to communicate with each other,
and then we're using some other programs and what not
to to actually record it. But yeah, a lot of
people haven't. You may be using something different. You might
be using what there's like Google meet, Microsoft meeting, like

(02:14):
Facebook flop. I mean they're like a million of them, right,
I mean this is an optagram. Yeah, it's a growth
industry figuring out and it makes sense. Right. We need
to still be able to connect with each other, We
still need to have meaningful meetings and all of those
less meaningful meetings, and in order to keep the gears
of business grinding away. Right. Yeah. And one of the

(02:37):
strange things I've noticed, and I've read other people noticing
the exact same thing, is that you might expect that
being able to do a meeting from your home over
the internet would be maybe less exhausting than a meeting
in person, But somehow I have not found it to
be the case. I found that, like, video chats can
be just intensely draining, like after where they're over, you

(03:00):
feel like you've been lifting weights or something. Uh. And
part of what's going on here I found very much
embodied in the spirit of an article that I saw
link to. It's it's just a Medium post. And I
want to be very clear that I'm not passing judgment
on the author here, that nothing wrong with with this person,
but the title of it just gave me chills. And

(03:21):
the title of this medium post was how to fake
eye contact during video chats and why it's important. Yes, uh,
this this was this is interesting. This was what a
medium article by Alexa Curtis, And they made three key
suggestions here. The first one is to use a webcam

(03:43):
even if no one else is okay. The second is
trick yourself into looking at the camera instead of at
the screen impossible, and then tape your prompts, your notes
whatever to your monitor as much as possible instead of
having to refer to like a notepad something. Yeah, the
suggestion is like, make a little fake face to go

(04:04):
around the webcam box so that you're looking into the
camera instead of at the screen. But I just don't
think it's like if your face is played back on
the screen unless you are able to turn your face
off for yourself. You just you're not going to be
able to help it, are you. Yeah. I actually, before
I read this, I kind of thought because I'd catch

(04:26):
myself doing this. Um. Now, now I should say that
I am lucky and that I do not have to
set through just hours and hours of meetings today and zoom.
I have friends who are definitely stuck in that boat,
and they seem exhausted by it. We use zoom in
these recordings, but for the most part, we're not actually
engaging in the video part of it. We we have
other stuff, we have notes, stuff that we're looking at

(04:48):
when we're recording. But I have found this to be
the case with my my Dungeons and Dragons group, which
used to meet in person, but now it's forced to
meet via zoom and we have this, you know, and
it's like a two or three hour zoom called you know,
like a three hour zoom called it would do once
a week to do Dengon and Dragons. And for some reason,

(05:09):
I've been noticing that I've just I felt kind of
worn out by it towards the end of of the night,
um in ways that I wasn't worn out previously meeting
in person, Like I just kind of felt zapped by it,
like if if we were battling something at the end,
I'm just kind of going through the motions. I'm just
not feeling it anymore at that point. Yeah, exact same experience.

(05:30):
I've done social stuff via video calls. I've also been
doing a D and D campaign, my my first ever
by the way, thank you over over zoom, and it's
been a lot of fun. But yes, it is. It
is kind of exhausting to just participate in the in
the eyeball Tennis of of the different video faces on

(05:51):
the screen. Something about it hooks its claws into your
brain and just pulls and stretches and kind of needs
your brain like a ball of dough. Yeah, now, fortunately,
I don't know how your campaign is going, but with ours,
were also using a couple other resources. We're using a
discord forum, and we're using role twenty to pull up
maps and such. So maybe maybe we should upgrade our

(06:13):
technology we're looking into. But but basically we have some
other things to captivate our eyes during this this process.
I guess one of the things about a straight up
like business zoom meeting is a lot of times you're
just stuck in those Brady bunch um cubes, right, You're
just you're just stuck with all these little screen pictures
of people and uh and some sometimes you have it

(06:33):
set to where one will take dominance over the others,
but you may just be looking at a wall of
people's faces, and then you're thinking about again this point
of should I be making eye contact with everybody? Should
I be focusing on trying to be the most presentable,
you know, the most professional looking, Like when they look
at my little box, it's like watching a TV broadcast

(06:54):
and I'm making direct eye contact with them. Maybe, but
because I have a little sticky smiley face that I've
put out at the top of my computer by the camera.
There are multiple ways in which this type of interaction
is not normal. I mean, of course, it's not normal
to be interfacing through technology at all. Of course, it's
kind of strange that you're not looking at the person
but you're looking at the screen, so the eye contact

(07:15):
is off. I understand that that point in the article.
But at the same time, it is not normal to
be able to see yourself while you're talking to people.
I can imagine if you know you were always talking
to people with a mirror in your hand that was
reflecting your face. Yeah, people would rightfully think you were insane.

(07:35):
That was how like self obsessed you were that you
go or I don't know, or afraid of Gordon's that
you always had to have a mirror in your hand.
And yet that's the reality we find ourselves there. And
I know this is this is not just like our
particular reaction to this. This is something that that I've
read about in multiple popular articles and also not just
an obscure scientific articles. Like there was an article I

(07:57):
came across in I think of his Business Insider that
is called like why you can't stop steering at yourself
in zoom calls. Yes, this was by Shia Fetter. Titled
a cyber Psychologist explains why you can't stop steering yourself
on zoom calls and everyone else is probably doing the same, um,
which I I have caught myself doing this sometimes during

(08:17):
Dunus and dragons, sometimes during work calls, where you know
you want to check in, you want to see how
you were presenting to the rest of the world. But
then it's often easy to sort of, you know, to
to to. You're looking at these wall of faces, and
then you decide to maximize your own, and you're like,
all right, let's see, how's the light hitting me, what's
my hair doing right now? How presented my smiling weird?

(08:39):
Like smiling weird? Do I look do I look engaged?
Or do I look as bored as I feel? You know? Um?
And so that's what this article gets into a little
of that year. So um. The article discusses some key
points made by cyber psychologist Andrew Franklin. So the first
one is that in general, adolescents tend to suffer for

(09:00):
from the imaginary audience delusion, the idea that people in
the surroundings are really paying attention to every move they make,
and this often follows us into adulthood as well. Yeah,
and this I think is pretty close to or perhaps
even just another name for the main issue we're going
to be focusing on today and otherwise known as the
spotlight effect. Now, one thing about this, this point about adolescents.

(09:25):
I mean, this is of course terrifying to think about,
given the nature of social media, which is pretty much
predicated on this sort of celebrity aspiring notion of a
constant audience and uh and in one tends to drift
to extremes and reaction to that, right, this feeling that
every word I put on the Internet, or every video,

(09:46):
every whatever is vitally important and will be viewed by
potentially everyone in the world. Yes, you're not just constantly
on view you are constantly being reviewed, is the perception. Yeah,
I know, obviously that's it's gonna from person person and
there some people are gonna use social media in a
way that hasn't far more limited scope only close friends

(10:07):
or maybe even family, maybe just one person can see
you know. But but but yeah, it does make me
wonder and this would have to be a you know,
a discussion for another time, like just what what what
is happening when this um spotlight effect, This imaginary audience
delusion is playing uh into our use of social media. Yeah,

(10:28):
but also so this psychology professor Andrew Franklin also makes
the point that like it's not just an illusion that
like video chats are actually exhausting. Yeah, Yeah, to make
the point that video chats are more stressful than in
person meetings, and a big part of that is just
everything is more distracted, more fragmented, and we have muted

(10:49):
or severely lessened nonverbal communicative skills. So you think of
a lot of this is kind of an overstatement of
the obvious, but you can do far less with your
body language, not only your overt body language like talking
with your hands and waving down people the other side
of the table, but in terms of just having a
bodily awareness of what everyone is doing and how they

(11:10):
are sort of reacting to what's going on, and if
someone else is about to speak or needs to speak. Yes,
And it's actually hard to tell who's looking at who,
Like you can assume if there are a bunch of
Brady bunch boxes that people are probably looking if they're
not looking at themselves, they're probably looking at the person
who's currently talking. But maybe not. You can't tell. Yeah,

(11:32):
And and it's also weird to think, like, I guess
maybe some of you out there had more of like
a you know, rules of order kind of a upbringing
or or you know, you had some more training and Okay,
this is how, this is how a business meeting goes,
this is how a work meeting operates. But I feel
for my part, a lot of it's just kind of
you just learn it. You go just sort of figure
out what is the culture of this group and this meeting,

(11:53):
and and how am I supposed to fit in? And
then to a certain extent, it feels like we've had
to relearn all of that or augment our understanding of
that based on the limitations of the technology. Yeah. I
think that's totally right, And and I would I would
emphasize yet again that not all digital socialization skills are
are interchangeable or transferable to one another. So you might

(12:15):
have been well acclimatized to the social skills one needs
in order to interact through a different type of mediated
social media like like Facebook or Twitter or something like that,
and still not really have any skills for how to
interact via a video chat. It's just like a different
set of skills, a different set of things to get
used to. Yeah, it's a different talking stick entirely now now.

(12:38):
Franklin also drives something that given the strain of keeping
up with everyone's tiny boxes and concern over how you
yourself look in your box, you might easily find yourself
just looking at yourself, staring into the digital mirror and
fixating on how you appear to friends, co workers, and
bosses and and Franklin maintains that this means you're likely overwhelmed.

(12:59):
I perceive games which which I totally get. Again, even
with the low stakes confines of dungeons and dragons. You know,
nothing huge is on the line here. But by the
end of the of the session again, I often find
myself kind of zapped in ways that I never felt
before within person gaming. And even though we're staring into
that digital reflection of our own face, Franklin stresses that

(13:22):
people are ultimately not fixating on you like you think
they are. They are not setting there watching you and
you know, dissecting everything about your appearance and in your
background and what your face is doing in any any
given sect. Yeah, No, they're probably much more likely fixating
on themselves the same way you are fixating on yourself.

(13:43):
Um uh. And so this brings us back to the
cognitive bias that we're gonna be focusing on in today's episode,
also known as the spotlight effect. And this effect is
very interesting because, on one hand, I think it's one
of the simplest psychological phenomena we've ever talked about on
the show. It's actually very simple to observe. It's very
straightforward in a way. But it's one of those things

(14:06):
where if you really internalize it, it's implications could be
kind of life changing. Yeah, it's one of these things
that doesn't I wouldn't say that it really like changes
in the nature of your reality, but it brings certain
aspects of it into maybe sharper focus. You might realize, Oh, well, okay,
that explains some of the things I feel when I

(14:29):
am in a meeting or you know, just walking around
u uh, you know, in a public space, or or
whatever the case may be. Um, I do feel like
it does it does? It does feel like a revelation
of it in its own way. Yeah. So the main
paper that I wanted to focus on today was published
in the year two thousand in the Journal of Personality

(14:52):
and Social Psychology by Thomas Gilovich of Victoria who Staid
Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky, and it's called the spot effect
in Social Judgment and ecocentric bias and Estimates of the
salience of one zone actions and appearance. You can pretty
easily find a full PDF of this online if you
want to read it. And this is a highly cited paper.

(15:13):
It has been referred to many many times in the
years since as a kind of seminal work on this
on this social cognitive bias. So the authors begin with
some anecdotal observations, and these observations are that for both
good and ill, it often seems like stuff you expect
other people to notice and recall about you really goes unnoticed. Uh.

(15:38):
And also on the good side, that might be like
something smart that you said in a discussion group. You're
like really pleased with yourself that like, oh, I had
that really good insight or I made that really funny joke,
and then it turns out later that nobody else seems
to recall that you said anything. Or perhaps this often
actually happens in athletic contexts where people will make a

(16:00):
really good shot in a basketball game or something, and
they will expect people to remember that they did that.
But then maybe it turns out that nobody really noticed.
It just kind of was one of the goals in
a game in which many goals were scored. And as
frustrating as this can be, it can also kind of
be a relief that it works the other way to
People often don't seem to have noticed when you make

(16:23):
what feels like a really obvious mistake faux paw on
a first meeting, or when you misspeak and what feels
like an embarrassing way, or that time you had spinach
in your teeth, like you obsess over that and you're
afraid it's going to completely ruin your reputation, that everybody's
gonna remember you for that thing forever. But a lot
of times it seems like maybe nobody even noticed. Yeah,

(16:45):
the dual nature of this particular revelation, I think ultimately
it is positive because yeah, and maybe it means you're
not as important as you thought you're. Maybe you're not
it's a it's a it's explosive personality as you thought
you were. But on the other hand, uh, you know,
maybe the stakes are a little bit lower every time
you hope in your mouth. Yeah. Yeah, that's the hypothesis

(17:06):
at the heart of this paper, that these anecdotal observations
are indicative of a real trend that can be measured
that in general, humans have an egocentric bias that causes
us to believe that our actions and our appearance are
much more salient and notable to other people than they
really are. Quote. People tend to believe that more people

(17:29):
take a note of their actions and appearance than is
actually the case. We dubbed this putative phenomenon the spotlight effect.
People tend to believe that the social spotlight shines more
brightly on them than it really does. Yeah, this is
insightful and I think we can all match this up
pretty easily, first of all with our own experiences, but
also with some of the ideas that we've discussed on

(17:50):
the show before. Uh specifically, first of all, there's the
self narrative aspect of our inner thoughts, you know, through
the inner workings of consciousness, were constantly weaving together a
store about who we are and how we fit into
the world. It's a little movie, and we're the main character,
so of course we're the most important person in that story. Right,
you're trying to link together a series of what are

(18:11):
in fact sort of random events into a cohesive narrative
with the logic to it. Right. And then through theory
of mind, we're constantly running simulations about the mental states
of other people, specific people, people in general, known people,
unknown people, sort of hypothetical people, uh and uh. And
of course one of the key aspects of any of

(18:32):
these simulations is, you know, how do they relate to me,
how do they think about me? What are their intentions
towards me? And that makes sense, right, There's an inherently
self centered quality to this sort of thinking, because it
all comes down to individual survival. We tend to air
on the side of seeing tigers in the grass when
there are none, which is better of the two possible

(18:52):
gambles here, But it also means going through life perpetually
imagining how the tiger sees you. Yeah, and so this
is in some ways the exact social equivalent of the
agency detection overdrive, where you, you know, over interpret a
crack of a twig as a tiger in the grass. Here,
you over interpret any little thing that that you think

(19:13):
maybe going wrong in a social interaction as something that
people will notice and remember and judge you for. So
maybe we should take a quick break and then when
we come back we can get a little bit further
into this study. Thank alright, we're back. Okay. So we're
talking about the study from the year two thousand by

(19:33):
Gilovich and co authors who are putting forth this this
putative phenomenon that at the time they called the spotlight effect,
the idea that we overestimate the salience of our appearance
and our behavior to other people. And the authors here
note several lines of previous research that helped point to
this conclusion. One of them is, first of all, this

(19:54):
may not be surprising at all, but people do tend
to have egocentric biases that you can measure quite easily
in in in tests. These are biases that overstate the
importance of the self. Just one example the site is
a paper by Ross and Sickly published in nineteen seventy
nine called ego centric Biases and Availability and Attribution, and

(20:16):
it showed it showed this in the realm of what's
called responsibility allocation, Who did, how much and how important
was what they did? So there are several different ways
you can test for this. Uh maybe in discussion groups,
maybe in household chores, maybe in basketball teams. Uh quote
one zone, contributions to a joint product are more readily available.

(20:41):
That is, more frequently and easily recalled. Individuals accepted more
responsibility for a group product than other participants attributed to them.
So the easy way of thinking about this is, oh,
our team one, because I scored that goal. Yeah. I
found this particularly telling. The authors now that that research

(21:01):
indicates that when individuals undertake complex social interactions, they alternate
between the roles of speaker or actor and listener or observer,
but much of their attention is ultimately going to be
directed in many cases at planning and executing their own responses.
And I think we can relate to this. Uh. You
know when when those times when you haven't quite zoned

(21:23):
out on a meeting, like you're not just or or
a conversation and you're not just you know, out here
thinking about Star Wars in the back of your head. No,
you're focusing instead on the thing that you're getting ready
to say, your interjection into the conversation, the joke that
you are intending to make when you get the talking
stick um, and uh, you know, because ultimately that's often

(21:46):
a part of any kind of like three way or
or or larger conversation is when when is it going
to be my turn? And how am I going to
make the most out of my my time speaking. I
believe there's actually a name for this exact defect. It's
a different thing that's been stun I mean, obviously it's
very related to the stuff we're talking about, but I
think it's called the next in line effect, where you

(22:08):
can measure that people have less recall of if you
if you like, sit people in a circle and go
around the circle asking them to speak, people have less
recall of the person who spoke right before them than
they do of everybody else, because you know, when the
person right before you was talking, you're planning what you're
gonna say. And and it means that when one thinks
back on a meeting, so you're in this meeting, you

(22:30):
have this period of time where you're you're applying most
of your cognitive efforts towards preparing for your own words,
and then when you think back on it, you're more
likely to remember the thing that you were focused on
at the time. You know your own words, your own contribution, um,
because that's where that's where you were spending the mental resources.
The exception to this, however, would be if one's could

(22:52):
contribution required a little effort, like instead of plotting to
interject something that will make everyone laugh or pursuing some
specific strategic aim in the meeting, what if it was
just the part of the meeting where every week your
boss says, hey, Roy, what are the numbers? Just read
us the numbers real quick, and then you read the
numbers something that's you know, quick and normal like that. Now,

(23:13):
the exception of this they mentioned would be passive observers,
people who are in the meeting but are not planning
to have the talking stick at any point, don't have
any kind of active role in the meeting, or if
they do, maybe it is just reading off the stats
and they don't have a larger role to play, so
they might well focus more on other people in the meeting.

(23:33):
They are they are going to be the ones that
are going to be more likely to notice what you
say or do. That that totally makes sense to me, Um,
I think I have much better recall of meetings where
I am not expected to speak. That being said, and
this is this is me, not the authors here, But
I suspect that the passive observers are also far more

(23:54):
likely to be thinking about star wars or what they're
they needed by a grocery school later the supernatural biker movies. Yeah,
or here's a big one. We didn't even get into this,
but via the zoom call, uh it one has a
tremendous ability to just simply go to other websites during
the call and still look basically attentive, right, because you'd

(24:18):
just be looking at the screen either way. Yeah, there's
your excuse, folks, Digital hookie. Has anybody tried just putting
up like a face like I know you can insertain
backgrounds on these video calls, putting up a background that
has a photo of them in it so it looks
like they're sitting there. I bet somebody has somebody out
there has got a little bit forward and figured out

(24:38):
a way to make it happen. It would be It
would be kind of the equivalent of I didn't Helmer
Simpson have some glasses at one point that made him
look like he was awake? Yes, it's when he's in
he's on a jury and he's expected to be paying attention,
but he is sleeping, right, that's right, I remember that
wide awake glasses and one of the other jurors narcs
on him. But yeah, so so anyway, the effect here,

(25:01):
I think is pretty straightforward. If an action stands out
in your own mind for whatever reason, you're going to
end up thinking it was more important in some objective
sense than it actually was. And so, in other words,
if people overestimate the relevance of their own actions in
an objective sense, wouldn't they also overestimate how relevant their

(25:21):
actions are subjectively to other people? Yeah? Yeah. The authors
also point out in many cases it might not matter
it maybe quote overlook when joint endeavors do not require
explicit allocations of responsibility. But obviously sometimes this is not
the case. Yeah. It particularly makes me think of a

(25:41):
frequent trope you see in films, the villainous meetings, when
you have villains around a table generally having a meeting,
having this sort of you know, dark, more antagonistic version
of our regular real life business meetings. Uh, the meetings
of Specter. The early James Bond Yes or Blowfeld would

(26:02):
have the have the command consoled like electrocute somebody's chair, yeah,
or another favorite of mine, or the meetings you see
the Imperial meetings in like Star Wars and New Hope,
or we're also in Rogue one. We we have the
likes of Darth Vader and Grand Moth Tarken or or
Orson Critic. You know, they're they're they're all objectively, they're

(26:23):
they're all talking about, okay, we need to get the
Death Star up and running. But these are all highly
egotistical and self focused individuals, and they all seen each
pretty focused on their own key role in everything, and
they're certainly not about like elevating the project itself above
personal ambition. Yeah. Yeah, they're clearly like trying to stick
up for their own branch. It's like, you know, dangerous

(26:43):
to your starfleet command or not to my battle station. Yeah, okay.
A few more previously observed. A psychological phenomenon that the
authors call attention to is is potentially backing up the
idea of a spotlight effect. Another one is what's known
as naive realism. The right quote. Naive realism refers to
the common tendency to assume that one's perception of an

(27:04):
object or event is an accurate reflection of its objective properties,
not a subjective interpretation or construle. In other words, look,
it happened just like I saw it. It's the tendency
to believe that your perception is unbiased and accurate, even
though you might readily attribute, you know, mistakes and biases

(27:24):
to other people's perceptions. Yeah, and this is all tied
up in the philosophy of perception. Um. So when we're
talking about naive realism also known as direct realism, that
stands in opposition to indirect or representational realism. So direct
or naive realism holds that we perceive things in the
world directly and without the then the mediation of any impression, idea,

(27:50):
or representation. And I think we can generally agree, especially
on this show, that this is not the true nature
of how a human process is reality. Know, the things
you see are are based on the external world, but
it's not an unbiased direct representation of the external world, right,
Like there's there's a weight to things, you know. It's
like if you know, if yesterday somebody slapped me with

(28:12):
the fish, today I see a fish and and like
that the nature of my perception is going to be
augmented by that previous experience. Now, indirect realism adheres to
the idea that material objects do have mind independent existence,
but but not that our visual perception is unmediated or
that these objects necessarily possess all of the features that

(28:34):
we perceived them to have. Like a quick example of
that would be, obviously, we look at our beloved pets,
and we may, you know, we may perceive them to
have various nuances that they simply do not have, and
you know, as pet owners, were generally okay with that. Yeah,
I think that's exactly right. And I think indirect realism,
I don't know, to me, that is the model of

(28:55):
the world that makes the most sense. Like I would
not say I'm an idealist, I believe the external world
doesn't exist. I don't go for that. But obviously, our
our ideas about what is motivating our dog or something
might be more us than actually coming from the dog. Yeah. Now,
of course, there's also phenomenalism, which generally rejects the mind
independent existence of material logics, but accepts un mediated visual

(29:19):
perception and the possession of of perceived features. So other
things are not things as much as they are bundles
of sense data, which is a weird way to to
behold your path. After Yeah, let's getting almost into kind
of George Berkeley and kind of territory that that I
don't think I can fully go for, but that it

(29:39):
ultimately doesn't really play into what we're talking about here. Again,
we're talking about direct realism or our naive realism versus
indirect or representational realism. Right, And I think we do
have a tendency to really underappreciate how much our perceptions
are affected by the kinds of mistakes and distortions that
we readily attribute to other people. And so the authors

(30:01):
of the two thousand paper, right, that quote applied to
the spotlight effect. This implies that it might be easy
to confuse how salient something is to oneself with how
salient it is to others, precisely because our own behavior
stands out in our own minds, it can be hard
to discern how well or even whether it is picked
up by others. Absolutely, we may be attending the same

(30:23):
meeting or Zoom conference call, but we are not all
attending the same meeting or Zoom conference call, you know
what I mean. We we all have different perceptions of
it based on our own biases, our own histories, our
own pervasive thoughts or you know, cognitive model of the
task at hand and our role in it. I mean,
our our subjective understanding of the meeting is going to
different person to person exactly. So leading into the next

(30:47):
thing here that the authors point out is as possibly
pointing to a spotlight effect. This is something that has
been documented known as this self as target bias. Quick example,
so you're in a classroom, the teacher gives a pop
quiz about last night's reading, and Johnny interprets this quiz
as an attack on him personally because he believes that
the teacher must believe that he didn't do the reading.

(31:10):
And you know, I think even the best of us
sometimes we fall prey to thinking like this something that
is a a general sort of action applied to everyone.
We think, why are they doing this to me? Yeah? Yeah,
especially if you have a light up, like a build up,
build up of anticipation about a given you know, meeting
or or social scenario. Yeah. And so the author's right

(31:34):
quote like naive realism, then the self is target bias
reflects a confusion between what is available to oneself and
what is likely to be available to and hence guide
the actions of others. So again, Johnny might think, well,
the teacher knows I didn't do the reading, and that's
why she's giving the test today, or she's giving the
pop quiz today. But the teacher doesn't know that. It's

(31:55):
just you know, that's what he knows. And then finally,
the author's point out that these previously documented eco centric
biases are very similar to the kind of egocentrism that
Jean Pierge observed pervading the cognition of young children early
in their development. One of the more important parts of
growing up, in fact, is shedding some of that ecocentrism.

(32:16):
But it turns out we don't shed it all. It
still appears in adults, simply in diminished form. It's certainly
more diminished in some people than it is in us. Yeah,
but yeah, so it's young children. I mean, people with
with kids will probably recognize this, often seem not to
grasp that other people have a different perspective than they do.

(32:37):
This happens when you're very young, and gradually, as you
get older, you get more, you get more consistent about
being able to accurately sort of model the minds of
others understand that they have different desires, different perspectives than
you do. And adults, of course by the time of adulthood,
usually recognize this gap rationally, but still might have a

(32:58):
hard time sort of calibrateing to predict it accurately. Now,
the authors of this paper here say that what is
the method that that we use to calibrate this this prediction.
They say that it's probably based on anchoring and adjustment. Now,
I was reading some follow up work by Gilovich about
the the anchoring and adjustment controversy. Very brief refresher on anchoring.

(33:21):
We've done an episode about this in the past. So,
like when you're trying to come up with an answer
to a question like how much is this car worth?
Or what do people think of the speech I just made?
You don't necessarily reason toward an answer from a neutral
starting point. We often tend to be influenced by sort
of like data points or hypothetical answers that we can

(33:44):
kind of hang a hat on to begin with, Which
might be one reason that you've got a good, you know,
price written on the on the windshield of a car,
even if that's not the price you would actually end
up paying Now this was the Now, the anchoring and
adjustment model was what the authors were working with. The
I'm that's the idea that we often think by starting
with an anchor and then we just adjust our estimate

(34:05):
up or down from the anchor. I was reading some
follow up work by Gilovich about the adjustment controversy, like,
is this really the way we think? Is this really
how we get to our anchor biased answers? Is it
based on this adjustment process? Apparently that idea has come
under some criticism in the past few decades, and there
are arguments about how to best understand what's happening in

(34:27):
people's heads when they fall for the anchoring bias. We're
not going to get into the weeds of that argument here.
You can check out our full episode on the anchoring
bias for more depth. Um, but whatever the role of
an adjustment mechanism in the brain, the anchoring effect does
actually appear in many scenarios, and the authors in this
paper are saying that the the anchoring effect manifests in

(34:49):
how we imagine the opinions of other people about us.
Because our our anchor, our starting point is how we
feel about ourselves. The stuff we notice about ourselves, and
then we kind of reason from there to what other
people's opinions would be. Well, that makes sense again, coming
back to the idea that we're using theory of mind
to ultimately create simulations about the mind states of everyone

(35:12):
in our lives from you know, from the person we're
closest with, two people that are just you know, like
supervisors or complete strangers, and uh and and all of
that is constructed with ourselves at the middle, like our
model of ourselfs um it is ultimately the like the
I guess you would say that the support structure on
which this entire network is built, Right, It's kind of

(35:35):
like you can't build any bridges two ideas of other
minds without starting from the foundation of your own. And
that foundation of your own is going to come with
a lot of baggage of like knowledge about yourself that
other people don't have, and high levels of concern about
your personal attributes that other people might not share, probably

(35:56):
don't share. And that's everybody We should need to drive
that home. Like we're not just talking thing about like
say like like stereotypically egocentric person you know, or someone
who has like like very obvious, uh, and pronounced personality
flaws or anything like that, or dealing with with various
mental health concerns or anything of that nature. But ultimately
this naive perception is also self perception as well. Yeah, yeah,

(36:20):
So I guess here we get to the actual empirical
part of this research, like how would you study this?
How would you look for empirical evidence of a spotlight effect?
And there are a number of studies that are covered
in this paper. I'm going to discuss them in sequence
and very broad strokes. Uh so, what let me guess
you know, what's going to be our our our key
um implement in this study. Is it going to be

(36:41):
like a god helmet that it stands my brain? Is
it going to be uh, you know, some other kind
of like high tech device that I'm cooking my nervous
system up to. You're extremely close. Now we get into
the cybernetics of a Barry Manilow T shirt. So the
question is something maybe a lot of you have wondered before.
People usually notice what's on your T shirt? Or do

(37:03):
they just not even care? It's a great question. I know,
when I wear a T shirt, I'm I I have
certainly caught myself, especially at least in retrospect, thinking way
too much about how others will perceive this shirt design. Yeah,
and what it's saying about me and my interest what
is it broadcasting to the world, And it would be
a But at the same time, I feel like I'm
always very interested in what other people's shirts say, to

(37:26):
the point that I sometimes feel self conscious about trying
to understand what someone shirt is because I'm like, I
don't want to be looking like caught staring at somebody's
T shirt. I think you probably notice certain kinds of
shirts more than others. Like you might pick up on
cues that like, oh, this is a band T shirt,
and I'm usually kind of interested in band t shirts,
and when we see what this is, But like other things,

(37:48):
if it's a i'd imagine like a football team or something,
you might not even take notice. That's true. I guess
the shirts I'm usually interested in our I guess, you know,
to a certain extent, band shirts, but if it has
any kind of like monster type thing, oh yeah, and
I definitely want to know what's going on. That's right,
that's our brains, that's just our brains being our brains.
Uh so so extremely simple set up for the study

(38:09):
Its dead simple. You get a group of participants to
gather in a room, and you have them basically in
there like filling out questionnaires for an experiment that is
supposedly about memory. And then another participant joins that group late,
but before they go into the room, you require them
to put on a Barry Manilow T shirt. Then, after
they've been in the room for a very brief time,

(38:31):
you say, actually, uh, this group has already gotten started,
so we're gonna hold you back for for another session.
And then you have the Barry Manilow interloper leave the room,
and then you ask everybody. Okay, you ask the interloper,
the Berry Manilow T shirt wearer, how many people in
the room do you think noticed that you were wearing
a Berry Manlow T shirt? And then you ask the

(38:52):
people who were in the room if they noticed who
was on the T shirt? Right, You're just very simple
comparing the person's expectation of how many people noticed too
how many people actually noticed. And true to prediction, the
students who wore the T shirt tended to wildly overestimate
how many people in the room would notice and be
able to identify their Manilow T shirt. Generally, the Manilow

(39:15):
interloper guests that about half of the other students on
average would be able to identify their T shirt, and
in reality only about twenty five percent of the observers
could do it. So in their minds, the people wearing
this potentially conspicuous piece of clothing mentally doubled the percentage
of people who they thought would notice it. Real quick, Joe,

(39:38):
when need the study you were looking at here? Did
you get to see this Manelo T shirt? No? I didn't.
That's my big question because I'm currently looking at various
very Manilow T shirts in UM managed search here, and
they do they do run the gamut here. We have
some we have some very forgettable Manilow shirts, but we

(39:59):
have some real singers here. Yeah. Well I think so.
I could be wrong, but I think what it was
was it was just like a picture of his face. Okay,
well even then, like it's a it's a noticeable face.
I mean that that was That's part of the whole
business proposal here. But there were also control groups for

(40:22):
this study. They in the control groups, this was an
interesting calibration. The control groups were not in the room,
but instead they watched the entire scene play out on
a video recording, and then they were asked to estimate
the number of observers who would notice the T shirt,
and the control groups guessed much closer to the real

(40:44):
number of people who would actually notice it, and they
did not overestimate to the extent that the person wearing
the shirt did. And this was taken as evidence that
quote the targets inflated estimates are not simply the result
of misguided general theories about observers powers of observation. In
other words, the relevant variable is I am the person

(41:06):
wearing it. Well, that makes sense. Again, we are the
we are the central character in our own narrative. Okay,
second study in this paper, so uh. It's worth noting
that the majority of the students that they interviewed in
the first study reported, in fact that wearing a very
Manilow T shirt was considered embarrassing, that Barry Manilow was
considered kind of corny and uncool. And it doesn't make

(41:28):
me wonder has Barry Manilow come full circle yet? Has
he become cool again? I don't know. Some of these
shirts I was just looking at look pretty cool. Yeah,
I think that was part of the design of the
first study was that this is a figure that not
everybody but a lot of people wearing the shirt. Would
you know, it's not just like any face. It's somebody
who a lot of students would probably feel kind of
embarrassed to be wearing a shirt of. But the question is, like,

(41:50):
does this phenomenon hold for T shirts that would not
be embarrassing? That would just be a picture of anybody,
maybe anybody that the student liked. So the second study
tested for the spotlight effect with reference to non embarrassing
personal details. It replicated the design of the first study,
but it allowed students to choose a T shirt featuring
a person that they liked and viewed as not embarrassing.

(42:14):
So it might be a T shirt of like Bob
Marley or Jerry Seinfeld or something. Wait, was Jerry Seinfeld? Really?
Was that? Was he specifically mentioned? And yeah, yeah, that
was one of them. How is that Jerry Seinfeld shirt
not embarrassing? I don't know. Some people didn't think it was.
You know, times changed, this was what you're two thousands

(42:34):
something like that. Yeah, I get the Bob Marley shirt.
I think remains that remains cool, But I just have
questions about the Gears Science Felt shirt. Maybe this is
again just tells more, says some more about my interest
versus other people's interests. But maybe I am uncool for
not wearing them. No, no, no, you're very cool, Robert.
But again there was a huge mismatch right between even

(42:57):
when you're wearing a shirt that's not conspicuously embarrassed, saying
to a number of students, people just predicted that observers
would notice who was on their shirt a lot more
than the observers actually did. It just makes me think
of of of myself or anyone you know. You've got
that new shirt and you're like, is today today? It
is today the day that I wear this, uh, this

(43:17):
new shirt going unleashed, this bad boy on an unsuspecting world.
Is the world ready? And yeah, the thing is, yeah,
they're ready, and yeah they'll be fine. Calson like don't
rended to worry about um Yeah, so so okay, But
that's appearance, that's just clothing items. What about for behavior?
Can we look for examples of this in behavior? So

(43:39):
the third study tested for whether the spotlight effect exists
not just for clothing, but for specifically stuff people say
in a group setting. Quote. In particular, we sought to
investigate whether people tend to believe that their positive and
negative actions stand out to others more than they actually do.
And this was tested with stage to discussion groups. So

(44:01):
they would have a discussion group meeting and then they
would ask people afterwards to rate other participants on both
positive and negative dimensions of their contributions. So you'd rate
all the people you just had a group with, and
you'd say, how much did participant X due to advance
the discussion. That'd be a positive mark, and then negative
things would be like how many speech errors did participant

(44:24):
X make? Or how likely was participants to offend someone?
And participants also rated, of course, what they thought others
would think of them. You know, then they turned it
on themselves and they found the same thing. The study
indicated that we tend to overestimate the salience of our
behavior to others in both positive and negative ways. So

(44:44):
it's not just like a self serving bias or self
critical bias. It's just we tend to assume people are
paying way more attention and noticing way more about the
stuff we do, both good and bad, which makes me
think of like the hell Raiser Ta line, it's like
angels to some devils to others. But really maybe you
think am I an angel or a devil? And in

(45:05):
fact you're just kind of a gray blur that someone
does not recall in any way, just an antiagu Now,
an important thing that's worth pointing out here is that
people's self ratings on this discussion group thing, we're not
entirely divorced from reality. To the contrary, the study found
that these ratings were in some ways based in reality.

(45:28):
People who rated themselves as doing more to advance the
discussion we're also on average rated by others as doing
more to advance the discussion. And people who rated themselves
as more likely to have said something that offended someone
were in fact more likely to have said something that
offended someone. But it's the size of these effects, both

(45:49):
positive and negative, that was exaggerated when people were thinking
about themselves so in self evaluation and insightful comment that
might have actually been an insightful comment to you, it
feels like, wow, that was earth shaking, I really changed
the game, or a faux paw that other people might notice,
but you know, doesn't really stand out to them all

(46:10):
that much. It might become reputation ruining, this terror, this obsession. Yeah,
that's interesting. Um, and again I wonder I can't help
think about social media and when you have systems that
are set up so that comments that are insightful may
seem more earth shaking because they are being you know,
re shared or retweeted or or lighthearted, etcetera. And then

(46:34):
and then likewise there is the negative reaction to the
things as well, And of course those tend to be
the extremes that we we we hear about in a
in a digital setting. Yeah, but even then, I think
the reality is that, like most people are not paying
attention to you and won't remember anything you did, right, right,
it's just humbling in a kind of nice way. Yeah. Okay,

(46:56):
a couple more studies real quick. One of them is
in the fourth one. This recreated the early T shirt scenario,
but then ask participants questions to probe how they came
up with their estimates. This is how the authors were
trying to test whether or not it was an anchoring
and adjustment mental process that people were using to to
get to their mistaken assumptions about other people's views of them,

(47:18):
and uh so their model Again, this could be it
could turn out that this is not the best way
to model the thinking going on here. But what they
thought at the time was that people start with their
own rich and powerful sense of how they appear to others.
They realize correctly that other people are not paying as
much attention to them as they pay to themselves, so
they may be adjust down from their own experience to

(47:41):
a hypothetical other observer, but they don't adjust enough. So
you know, how important was what I just did? Uh? Well,
to me, it was a ten, but I know other
people probably aren't going to rate it at ten, so
I'll say it's a nine to them, but in reality
was maybe like a yeah or a four. And then
the last of the last of the studies, the fifth one.

(48:02):
This one I think established something that's very important that
we can come back to in a minute. This tested habituation.
If people are allowed a period to get used to
wearing the unfamiliar very Manilow T shirt, will they feel
less self conscious about others noticing it? And the answer
is yes. If you wear the T shirt for a

(48:22):
while before going in front of other people, you will
tend to imagine that fewer of them took notice of
it than if you just put it on and then
go in. But of course, in these scenarios, absolutely nothing
has changed for the observers. The only thing that has
changed is you. The more that you're more used to
the shirt yourself, you're less conscious of it, so you
imagine less consciousness among others. So in this game, like

(48:45):
if if I don't know if anyone has ever had
this experience being you know, somebody who wears a well
worn but offensive T shirt an inappropriate setting, um, like
you know, they're used to it, they're used to the
potentially profane statement that is on it. But everyone else, man,
it might not be ready for Yes, I think this
is actually a various tute observation and it will come

(49:07):
back to something I want to get at right at
the end, here, should we take another break, and then
when we come back we can discuss some of the
implications of this research. Let's do it. We'll be right back,
Thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. We're continuing
our discussion here of of the spotlight effect and uh
and of course the various key shirt experiments, Uh that

(49:31):
relate to that explanation. Yeah, So I wanted to talk
about some commentary on and and implications from the spotlight effect.
To whatever extent this is a real effect, it does
appear like it still stands. I mean, I would be
interested to see some more recent research replicating this, but
but it looks pretty solid to me. One of the
things that the lead author of the study we've been

(49:53):
talking about, Gilovich, Uh, he's noted in another source he
actually had an article a about the spotlight effect for
the Encyclopedia of Social Psychology edited by Baumeister and Voes.
And in that article, Gilovich notes that research indicates the
quote people of all ages are prone to the spotlight effect,
but it appears to be particularly pronounced among adolescents and

(50:17):
young adults. So as you get older, the spotlight effect
seems to work less powerfully on your brain. What would
explain this, Well, one answer might be experienced. Right in
over time, you just learn through experience that people pay
less attention to you and notice less about you than
you expect them to. And it's possible this does play

(50:38):
some role. Maybe you get conditioned, you kind of learn
how things work in life, and you experience less of
this cognitive bias. But Gilovich identifies a different reason, and
that reason is that social motivation is stronger when you're younger.
Younger people show a heightened consciousness of and concerned for
their standing within social groups quote. But having a heightened

(51:02):
concern with one's social standing means, by its very nature,
that one is vulnerable to having an excessive concern with
one standing and hence is likely to overestimate the extent
to which one is the target of others thoughts and attention.
So I'd say to take away from this maybe a
special message to like younger and like teenage listeners, like

(51:23):
other people really probably are noticing less about you and
thinking less about you than you think they are, as
shocking as that may be to hear. Another thing that
that's related to this idea that the authors mentioned in
their in their discussion section on their paper is the
way that the spotlight effect relates to something that's known
as the illusion of transparency. So the illusion of transparency

(51:48):
is the belief that your internal states are more observable
to others than they actually are. We often assume that
our unspoken thoughts and our feelings can be sort of
sniffed out and discerned by people around us. But that's
usually not true, not not to the extent that we
think it is. And there are examples of this from

(52:08):
empirical research. For example, if you stage a mock negotiation
where people are trying to, you know, negotiate to get
to a certain price on something, people tend to imagine
that they have given away more information about what they're
trying to get than they actually have. Another variation is
that studies show that a lot of times people imagine

(52:30):
that other people can tell when they are lying, but
in reality, people can't actually tell when people are lying,
or at least I mean, some people maybe can tell
some of the time, but most of the time, other
people cannot tell if you're lying, cannot spot your lies
with nearly as much accuracy as you think they can

(52:51):
do with that information what you will, I really don't.
I think it's it's like, it's a great point because
first of all, we all lie, like lying is is
is part of our communication. Sweet you know we're gonna
individuals are gonna engage in it to varying degrees, but
you know, it is important to have that tool in
your toolbox. You know, if someone shows you a picture

(53:13):
of a baby and and uh and and and you're
expected to comment upon it, it is generally in your
best interest to lie if you think that baby is ugly, right,
or or at least find some way to uh that
is not just comedic adherence to truth. Right, You can
you can find something nice to say that isn't necessarily untrue. Right.

(53:35):
And yet at the same time, lying can be, or
at least certainly feel like a high risk act, right.
I mean, no one wants to be caught in a
lie um, even if the stakes are ultimately kind of low.
I mean, I guess maybe even more so at times
if the stakes are low, because why are you lying
about that? Well, like, why didn't you say you didn't

(53:55):
like this picture of my baby? Or I don't know
me say, I can't think of a specific example, but okay,
here's a potential example where if someone says, hey, if
you're seeing guy hard too, and you're like, oh, yeah,
it's pretty good, and and maybe the thing is you
haven't seen it, you have no interest in saying maybe
you think that the whole concept sounds kind of stupid,
but you want to be polite about it, and you

(54:16):
also don't want to be You don't want to the
plot to have to be explained to you now you
know you didn't see it in the theater. You also
don't want to hear your friend Ron surprise it for you.
But then if they're like, oh, yeah, what was your
favorite part? Well, crap. Now this has become a much
stickier situation because I'm lying about having seen Guy Hard too. Yeah.
But people tend to assume that, like that fact that

(54:39):
they're lying about having seen die Hard Too is somehow
leaking out of them in an observable way. And in
some cases it might be like some people do have
big tells when they're lying, but generally that information is
not leaking out as much as people imagine it is.
And I wonder if this is compounded to a certain
extent by the lying we observe in media lying, that is,

(54:59):
the are exposed via conflicting relevant media like here's a
here's one scene of politicians saying one thing, and here's another.
Here's the another bit of footage that shows that they're lying,
or more often overt lying by a fictional character, which,
of course is is played up for dramatic effect and
is also an artificial situation, you know, and that we
know they are lying to another care Oh yeah. But

(55:22):
it's also like there is there's a stock type of
hero in like detective fiction and all that, the person
who can just magically tell when other people are lying
and that that skill. No, but then there's a wonderful
character in the recent Watchman series on HBO looking Glass, Yes,

(55:45):
played by the great Tim Blake Nelson. I mean the
character has the tower, not not Nelson himself, right, yeah,
And we love characters like that, right, I mean, that's
a really fun power to try to see realized in fiction.
But uh, just lies or not disease need to sniff
out as I mean to to really detectualize in reality.
What you have to try to do is like trap

(56:06):
people in contradictions and stuff like ask a bunch of
follow up questions. It doesn't just leak out of your
face that yes I'm telling a lie and you can
smell it absolutely. And you know, I also think about
this in terms of religious upbringing. Um, I don't know
about you, but the growing up in the sort of
pen optagonical teachings of of a Protestant Church. There was

(56:27):
always this idea that God and and also the devil
and perhaps other entities like lesser angels and demons what
have you were privy to your inner thoughts, you know,
the whole idea that it wasn't just what you said
and did that made you sinful, it was also what
you were thinking about doing, or considering doing, or just
entertaining the mental images of doing. So there was this

(56:47):
ingrained notion that your private thoughts are not private at all,
at least not so far as supernatural entities are concerned. Yeah,
that's right, And I guess it is possible that this
could have a conditioning effect to make you assume that general,
your private thoughts are not private. Maybe they're observable not
just two supernatural entities, but to other regular entities that

(57:08):
you interact with every day. Yeah, because I definitely remember
at times, certainly when I was younger, sort of freaking
out at times about just the idea of other humans
being privated in my thoughts, you know, an idea that
was probably also compounded by science fiction that is just
lousy with psychics, right, um, and also these not quite
psychics but just really insightful TV. So with the Hannibal lecters,

(57:33):
basically they like, look at you and tell your whole
life story. Yeah. But but then again, as we've discussed
on the show before, this is this sort of fear
is not entirely unfounded given the potential trajectory of some
of our technology. That's true, but that's technology. I mean,
normally people are not doing like AI, you know, learning
on data sets about your social media use or whatever.

(57:54):
There was one more example given about the illusion of
transparency that I really liked, which was that, uh, people
overestimated the extent to which observers could tell whether the
drink they were drinking was pleasant or nasty tasting, even
though they were supposed to use a neutral facial expression.
So you give people drinks this one, this one tastes good,

(58:16):
this one tastes disgusting, and you tell them they have
to maintain a neutrol facial expression while they drink them.
People assumed, oh, yeah, people can just read it on
my face that you know that that was a nasty one.
But it turns out people can't read all that. Well.
Good to know when you have your next inner party
um in the year, hopefully it's gonna be the next

(58:37):
thing after a competitive eating right now, So right now
it's the people who wolfed down like thirty white castles
or whatever. The next thing is how many nasty drinks
can you drink? I can see it becoming a big hit. Okay,
one last thing. So the authors of this two thousand
paper ask a question, when is the spotlight effect most
pronounced and when is it least pronounced? There'll be such

(59:00):
a thing as like a reverse spotlight effect, a sort
of mental cloak of invisibility where other people are noticing
you more than you think they are, And the authors think, yeah,
this is probably possible. They claim that this would probably
correlate with the subject's own consciousness of their appearance or behavior.

(59:21):
So obviously, the more conscious you are of your own
appearance and behavior, the more conscious of it you imagine
other people are, and probably vice versa. If you're less
conscious of yourself, you're imagining other people are less conscious
of you. And so for this reason, it might be
correlated somewhat to the novelty of what you're doing or wearing,

(59:41):
or what you look like or how you sound. So
remember in the fifth study in in that paper, uh,
the spotlight effect was less pronounced for people who had
some time to get used to wearing a potentially embarrassing,
conspicuous T shirt. So it's highly possible that we are
most likely to manifest the spotlight effect when we're doing
something new or unusual. Well, that's interesting. It kind of

(01:00:04):
ties back to what we're talking about earlier, about when
you're about to say something in a meeting and you're
putting a lot of cognitive effort into preparing for that
and preparing to do something that you don't normally do. Yeah, exactly,
takes more effort, it takes up more space in your brain.
It's more salient to you, and you assume it's more
salient to other people. So it's possible. This isn't proven yet,

(01:00:25):
but it's possible that the inverse effect, where we would
underestimate how much other people are noticing our appearance and behavior,
it's possible this happens when we are least conscious, meaning
during highly familiar, routine or automatic behaviors. There's actually an
example that has been studied here, uh and the example

(01:00:48):
and I thought this was interesting. So people underestimate the
extent to which other people notice their cologne or perfume,
so you cover yourself in a fragrance, you become accustomed
to that fragrance and you stop noticing it, right Olfactory
desensitization sets in. You no longer smell it yourself, so

(01:01:08):
it basically disappears for you. But other people smell it
even if you don't expect them to. Yeah. Yeah, I
think we all have had that experience with with someone
who has just outrageously powerful per fume, you know, like
sometimes the extent that it announces their presence. Yes, yeah,
sometimes people just lather up. And this makes me wonder

(01:01:30):
about whether the spotlight effect is especially salient for appearance, because,
of course, we normally can't really see ourselves when we're
going about our lives. If we're in a regular business
meeting talking, we can't see our face. We might be
able to see our bodies if we look down at it.
We're probably not looking down, probably looking up at the room.

(01:01:50):
But we're also frequently suddenly reminded of our appearance when
we walk in front of a mirror or log into
a web meeting or something. So it might be the
sort of perfect mix of obliviousness in your regular behaviors
and then the sudden shocking reminders of oh yeah, I
look like this to external people, and that kind of

(01:02:12):
keeps you on your toes. Like what if after putting
on some cologne you could suddenly smell it intensely again
every hour or so. Yeah, I mean that's theme. You
put it like that, it almost sounds like it would
be helpful. But I don't feel like our experiences with
our own footage in a zoom call or what have you,

(01:02:33):
is necessarily helpful. It really feels like built in egocentric feedback, yeah,
because there's too much of it. It's just constantly there.
So anyway, if we assume that the spotlight effect is real,
it is a something that's generally true about people might
not be true to the same extent for everyone. But
if this effect is correctly observed, what would the implications

(01:02:54):
for our lives be. Well, Gilovich has actually gotten kind
of kind of sweet about this, so he notes that,
you know, there's studies that show that later in life,
most people report that their major regrets about their lives
concern things that they failed to do rather than things
that they did. It's not the same for everybody, but
that is a much more common framing and you've probably

(01:03:15):
read about this before. This is widely observed. So many
of the things that people want to do, but never do,
they hold back from them out of a sense of
self consciousness or anxiety about how people are going to
perceive us, you know, for doing these things. So one
easy example might be that you failed to ever take

(01:03:36):
up playing a musical instrument because you fear that other
people will judge you as unskilled at playing it, especially
at first. And so the research on the spotlight effects
suggests that we are were very likely to be overestimating,
perhaps even grossly overestimating, how much people would even notice

(01:03:56):
whatever it is that we're afraid of doing. And the
authors of the study right quote. The lesson of this
research then, is that we might all have fewer regrets
if we properly understood how much attention or inattention our
actions actually draw from others. Yeah, that is. It is
kind of a sweet twist on it. You know. It's
like saying, look, go go for it, go through you

(01:04:18):
live your dream, because nobody's really going to pay that
much attention even when it falls flat. Dance like nobody's watching,
because probably nobody is watching, or if they are watching
they might not even remember. I mean, it's just like
you're you're probably way over concerned about possible minor faux
pause or looking weird or awkward. Yeah, like they're probably

(01:04:41):
even if they're they're watching you and they're thinking about it,
they're probably thinking, oh, man, do I look like that
when I danced by myself? What do I look like
when I danced by myself? This? Uh uh, this reminds me.
That's talking about situations where you realize that it may
be perceived as as weird by other people, were embarrassing
by people. So obviously I've mentioned Star Wars like three

(01:05:02):
times so far. I'm mostly tracked in the house here
and me and my son are super in Star Wars.
He has a couple of lightsabers, and he'll he'll often
ask me to go out to have a lightsaber battle
with him, which is something we have to do outside
because otherwise we would destroy things in the house, and
we have to do it in the front yard because
the mosquitoes are too bad in the back yard. Um,

(01:05:24):
so we'll have this fight in the front yard. People
driving by we'll be able to see it, which generally
I imagine they'll say oh, well, there's a dad having
a lightsaber battle with with his son. That's great, the
sweetest thing you'll see all day. But occasionally my son,
who's much he gets so into this. Occasionally he'll have
to run over to the side of the house to
like fight a pretend droid or something, which leaves me

(01:05:46):
in the front yard apparently by myself fighting pretend droids.
And I realized when that happens, people may drive by
and think that I have lost my mind, um, which
I don't know. I'm I'm okay with I'm ultimately okay.
I don't think you got anything to worry about. Man.
That's that that that's gonna be the ray of sunshine

(01:06:06):
in the in the day of so many people driving by. Seriously,
if I was driving by and I saw uh, and
I saw some people having a lightsaber duel in their
front yard, I would be like, that's you know, there's hope,
a new hope. Yeah. Maybe maybe that's what I'm doing.
I'm giving people hope that they they're like, I didn't
realize I could do that as a grown up, that
I could just uh get a lightsaber and uh and

(01:06:28):
start having pretend battles in my front yard. I'm gonna
do it. That's gonna make this quarantine situation a lot easier.
Along the same lines, I am extremely in favor of
adults climbing trees. There's this bizarre idea that adults shouldn't
climb trees. Climbing trees is for children. Why adults should
climb trees all the time? I love a good climbing tree.
It's a good skill to have. I see people in

(01:06:48):
movies having to do it all the time to escape,
like you know, robot and monsters and whynot. Yeah, so
go for it. Yeah, those like those Boston Dynamics dog
robots are coming for you. Where are you gonna go?
You got to get a joke, like suddenly you've got
to climb a tree and you haven't been practicing for
twenty or thirty years. Good luck? And then what if
you have to fight it with a lifesaver. Also, you've

(01:07:11):
got to keep those skills war you know, these are
the skills one needs to survive in the waste land. Alright, Well,
we're gonna go ahead and close it out there. I
think we have there's a lot of material in here
for everyone to think about, and we of course, await
listener responses to this, how how do you perceive the
spotlight effect in your own life or in the lives

(01:07:31):
of others? Has this forced you to to rethink anything
going on in the world around you, or how you
indeed engage in your daily or weekly U conference digital
conference calls for the book. In the meantime, if you
would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, including that when we mentioned anchor in
the Mind dealing with anchoring, you can find those wherever

(01:07:54):
you get your podcasts. I will say this, you can
certainly find our our I heart radio list by going
to stuff Toble your Mind dot com. And if you
go there, you'll see a little part of the page
and says show links. There is a store link there,
and if you go there you will find T shirts
that are bringing it around. And some of them are cool. Uh,

(01:08:17):
some of them I would personally be embarrassed to wear.
You'll have to look at them and trying to decide
which which design is great. But we charge every listener
to buy one cool T shirt and one extremely embarrassing
T shirt. Yes, well we have both there, so go
check them out if you so desire Um. I don't know.
None of them have very manolol on the front though,

(01:08:38):
so you need to do a separate image search to
see what I'm talking about there. Huge thanks as always
to our excellent audio producers Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hi, you can
email us at contact that Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of

(01:09:06):
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