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The spotlight effect is the psychological phenomenon by which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are. Being that one is constantly in the center of Self-concept, an accurate evaluation of how much one is noticed by others is uncommon. The reason for the spotlight effect is the Cognitive bias to forget that although one is the center of one's own world, one is not the center of everyone else's. This tendency is especially prominent when one does something atypical, such as committing a .
Research has empirically shown that such drastic over-estimation of one's effect on others is widely common. Many professionals in social psychology encourage people to be conscious of the spotlight effect and to allow this phenomenon to moderate the extent to which one believes one is in a social spotlight.
As an example of the spotlight effect, Kleck and Strenta (1980) examined how subjects perceived reactions to them having a physical disfigurement. In their study, volunteers had a cosmetic effect applied to their face which had the appearance of a prominent facial scar. The volunteer was shown the scar in a mirror. The makeup artist then applied a "cream" to "prevent the scar from drying out". The volunteer then went in to a second room where they were instructed to have a normal conversation with another person on a given topic. On return, the volunteer rated their perceived reaction to "having a scar": whether they perceived the other person as being more tense than normal, making less eye contact, being more distant, more patronizing, etc. The results were that the volunteers perceived that they were treated significantly "differently" because of the scar. In reality, however, when the "cream" was applied before they entered the room, the scar was removed entirely by the makeup artist, without the volunteer realizing it. Thus the perception of being treated differently was entirely due to the volunteer's self-consciousness.
Another related phenomenon is called the false-consensus effect. The false-consensus effect occurs when individuals overestimate the extent to which other people share their opinions, attitudes, and behavior. This leads to a false conclusion which will increase someone's self-esteem. The false-consensus effect is the opposing theory to the false uniqueness effect, which is the tendency of one to underestimate the extent to which others share the same positive attitudes and behavior. Either of these effects can be applied to the spotlight effect.
The self-as-target bias is another closely linked phenomenon with the spotlight effect. This concept describes when someone believes that events are disproportionately directed towards him or herself. For example, if a student had an assignment due in class and did not prepare as well as they should have, the student may start to panic and think that simply because they did not prepare well, the teacher will know and call on them for answers.
Also relevant to the spotlight effect is the illusion of transparency (sometimes called the observer's illusion of transparency), which is people's tendency to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others. Another manifestation of the illusion of transparency is a tendency for people to overestimate how well they understand others' personal mental states. This cognitive bias is similar to the illusion of asymmetric insight, in which people perceive their knowledge of others to surpass other people's knowledge of themselves.
Other related concepts are egocentric bias, self-referential encoding, self-reference effect and ideas of reference and delusions of reference.
Salience of ideas and important contributions within a group are additional aspects of social judgment that are affected by the spotlight effect. Individuals tend to overestimate the extent to which their contributions make an impact on those around them. In a group setting, those contributions are thought of by the individual as being more significant than the contributions of their group members and that the other members believe the same about that individual's contributions.
Similarly, Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky further elaborated upon their research and concluded that in situations involving an audience member whose sole purpose is to observe, the severity of the spotlight effect is not overestimated because the focus of an audience's attention is centered upon the individual performing.
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