Spotlight Effect - do people really care about you as much as you do.
This might shock some you– and this is tough to tell you but you are not the center of the universe. At least not in the eyes of others. While this has been proven time and time again we still internally fall into this trap. People tend to assume their features and behaviors are more salient to others than what they generally are. This is termed the Spotlight effect, the tendency to believe that other people are paying closer attention to one’s appearance and behavior than they really are.
You drop a glass, you mess up in a presentation, or you just think you don’t look right in that video you released on Facebook. While you notice these things and this may change the you outcome for your day oftentimes the ones around us are oblivious to these things.
Let’s Talk a Little Science
Thomas Gilovich, PhD, Victoria Husted Medvec, PhD, and Kenneth Savitsky, PhD, the psychologists who coined the term spotlight effect, also devised numerous ways to measure it. In one experiment, they had college students enter a room with other students while wearing an “embarrassing” Barry Manilow T-shirt. When the mortified (I didn’t know Barry Manilow was such a scary guy) students were asked to guess how many people in the room would remember the face on their T-shirt, they gave a number about twice as high as the number of students who actually remembered the shirt.
Other studies support what this one suggested: The spotlight effect makes most of us assume we’re getting about twice as much attention as we actually are. When Lincoln said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” he was wrong—but only because he was president of the United States. If you are currently president, rest assured that millions will note and long remember if, say, you barf on the prime minister of Japan. However, if you are not president, you’re probably pointlessly blinded by the glare of imaginary social judgments.
Taking Advantage
Taking advantage of this effect is can be powerful. Instead of focusing on what to you seems the issue focus on what you accomplished. This spotlight is typically just inside your mind and in your own world. While constructive criticism is good also remember that if you are confident about your subject and about what you do that this will exceed any outward appearance.
In the book Bag the Eelephant by Steve Kaplan he tells about giving a presentation to a candy company he was looking to land as a client. The clients came in the conference room with coffee and bagels and sat down to view his plan. The first thing he was going to share was their design for the new logo The Big Pass. He flipped off the lights, turned on the projector and in big red letters… The Big Ass.
Late hours had shown through. Not only was this on the slide but it was also embedded in the template, which meant that it was on the lower corner of every slide. With a quick joke and moving past it Steve was able to land the account. The client later told him that part of the reason was the were impressed we weren’t distracted by the screw up.
