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The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment: an Egocentric Bias in Estimates of the Salience of One's Own Actions and Appearance

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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 Copyright 2000 by the Ainerican Psychological Association, Inc. 2000, Vol. 78, No. 2, 211-222 0022-3514100/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.78.2.211 The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment: An Egocentric Bias in Estimates of the Salience of One's Own Actions and Appearance Thomas Gilovich Victoria Husted Medvec Cornell University Northwestern University Kenneth Savitsky Williams College This research provides evidence that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted by others, a phenomenon dubbed the spotlight effect. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who were asked to don a T-shirt depicting either a flattering or potentially embarrassing image overestimated the number of observers who would be able to recall what was pictured on the shirt. In Study 3, participants in a group discussion overestimated how prominent their positive and negative utterances were to their fellow discussants. Studies 4 and 5 provide evidence supporting an anchoring-and-adjustment interpre- tation of the spotlight effect. In particular, people appear to anchor on their own rich phenomenological experience and then adjust--insufficiently--to take into account the perspective of others. The discussion focuses on the manifestations and implications of the spotlight effect across a host of everyday social phenomena. Most of us stand out in our own minds. Whether in the midst of view as extraordinary and memorable go unnoticed or underap- a personal triumph or an embarrassing mishap, we are usually preciated by others. The same is true of the actions we wish to quite focused on what is happening to us, its significance to our disown because they reflect poorly on our ability or character. lives, and how it appears to others. Each of us is the center of our They too may have less impact on our audience than we might own universe. think. An "obvious" social gaffe on a first date, an awkward Because we are so focused on our own behavior, it can be stumble at the front of a line, or the misreading of a crucial passage difficult to arrive at an accurate assessment of how much--or how of a prepared speech--each may seem shameful and unforgettable little--our behavior is noticed by others. Indeed, close inspection to us, but they often pass without notice by others. reveals frequent disparities between the way we view our perfor- The thesis we present in this article is that these disparities are mance (and think others will view it) and the way it is actually seen frequent and predictable and reflect an egocentric bias in people's by others. Whether making a brilliant point in a group discussion, assessments of the extent to which their actions and appearance are contributing to a successful project, or executing the perfect jump salient to others. People tend to believe that more people take note shot on the basketball court, we sometimes find that the efforts we of their actions and appearance than is actually the case. We dub this putative phenomenon the spotlight effect: People tend to believe that the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than Portions of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the it really does. Eastern Psychological Association, Providence, Rhode Island, April 1994, Several lines of research hint at the existence of such a spotlight and the 104th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Associ- effect. M. Ross and Sicoly's (1979) important work on responsi- ation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 1996. This research was supported bility allocation demonstrated that people are often so focused on by National Science Foundation Research Grants SBR9319558 and their own contributions to a joint enterprise that their assessments SBR9809262. of "who did how much" tend to be biased in their own favor. Ross We thank Antonio Annzunziato, Lisa Barcelo, Souhir Ben-Hamida, and Sicoly's research dealt with egocentric biases in people's Theresa Bucldey, Todd Bickford, Deborah Fidler, Danielle Kaplan, Sara Lederman, and Bryn Lovejoy-Grinnell for their help in collecting and assessments of what transpired, but a similar effect may exist with coding these data. respect to people's judgments of how salient their own efforts are Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Thomas to others. Actions that stand out in one's own mind and give rise Gilovich, Department of Psychology, Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, to egocentric distortions in allocations of responsibility may like- New York 14853; Victoria Husted Medvec, J. L. Kellogg Graduate School wise generate biased assessments of how salient one's actions are of Management, 2001 Sheridan Road, Northwestern University, Evanston, to others. The present research, then, picks up where Ross and Illinois 60208; or Kenneth Savitsky, Department of Psychology, Bronf- Sicoly left off and explores how egocentric tendencies akin to man Science Center, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts 01267. Electronic mail may be sent to tdgl @cornell.edu, [email protected], those they examined tend to distort people's assessments of the or kenneth.k.savitsky@ williams.edu. extent to which their efforts are the subject of others' attention. 211 212 GILOVICH, MEDVEC, AND SAVITSKY Another intellectual tradition that makes contact with the spot- Study 1 light effect is the work on naive realism (Gilbert & Gill, 1997; Piaget, 1929; L. Ross & Ward, 1996). Naive realism refers to the As an initial test of the spotlight effect, we conducted an common tendency to assume that one's perception of an object or experiment in which our target participants were required to don a event is an accurate reflection of its objective properties, not a potentially embarrassing T-shirt before briefly entering a room in subjective interpretation or constrnal. This often entails the con- which other participants were assembled. We then asked the target comitant belief that because one's own perception is veridical, participants to estimate the number of people who noticed their what one perceives oneself should be similarly perceived by most shirt, and we compared the participants' estimates with the actual everyone else (Asch, 1952; Ichheiser, 1951; Piaget, 1926, 1928). number who noticed. We predicted that people would be so con- Applied to the spotlight effect, this implies that it might be easy to sumed with their own knowledge of the shirt and the embarrass- confuse how salient something is to oneself with how salient it is ment it engendered that they would be unable to accurately assess to others. Precisely because our own behavior stands out in our how noticeable it was to others. In particular, we predicted that own minds, it can be hard to discern how well (or even whether) they would overestimate the number of people who noticed their it is picked up by others. shirt. A third phenomenon relevant to the spotlight effect is the self-as-target bias, or the sense that actions or events are dispro- portionately directed toward the self (Fenigstein, 1984; Zucker- Method man, Kernis, Guarnera, Murphy, & Rappoport, 1983): "I'm not Participants. One hundred nine Cornell University undergraduates prepared today and I just know she's going to call on me"; "I bet volunteered to participate in exchange for extra credit in various lower- those people giggling over there are laughing at me"; "The lead division psychology classes. Fifteen served as target participants (8 actress seems to be directing her lines primarily in my direction." women, 7 men), 64 as observers, and 30 as controls in one of two The effect may be particularly familiar to academics, some of conditions. The observers were scheduled for a time 5 min before each whom may have had an uninspiring athletic history: Little Leagu- Procedure. target participant was due to arrive. We scheduled 6 observers for each ers who are "hidden" by their coaches in right field (where the ball session, hoping that 5 would actually show up. The nonattendance rate was is least often hit) nonetheless feel certain that the next fly ball will a bit higher than anticipated, however, resulting in one session with 6 be hit their way. Not only that, but they are convinced that the observers, five sessions with 5, seven sessions with 4, and one session each opposing team has sensed their questionable talents and is trying to with 3 and 2. On arrival, the observers were led to a laboratory room and hit to right field. Like naive realism, then, the self-as-target bias asked to take a seat at a long table in the center of the room. Because chairs reflects a confusion between what is available to oneself and what had been placed on one side of the table only, all participants took seats is likely to be available to (and hence guide the actions of) others. facing the doorway. The experimenter explained that they would begin by In Lewinian terms, it represents a failure to recognize fully that the simply filling out a questionnaire, which the participants then worked on as representation of oneself in one's own "life space" is unlikely to be the experimenter sat idly by. matched by an equally strong representation in the life space of Meanwhile, 5 rain after the observers' arrival, the target participant arrived at another part of the lab. A second experimenter informed the others (Lewin, 1935). target that the experiment would take place in another room, but, before As these different bodies of research suggest, the spotlight effect going there, the target needed "to put on this T-shirt." The experimenter appears to arise largely from the same sort of egocentrism that then handed the target a shirt with a large (21 cm X 24 cm) picture of the Piaget argued pervades the thinking of young children (Flavell, head and neck of singer Barry Manilow (a musician who is not terribly Botkin, & Fry, 1968; Piaget, 1926, 1928, 1929).
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