Why It Feels Like People Are Looking at You (and Why They’re Actually Not)
Posted February 9, 2016
By Andy Luttrell
I’m sure you’ve had this experience. You do something that seems so embarrassing, it consumes all of your attention, and you’re sure that everyone’s watching you, reveling in how embarrassing your faux pas was. Later you find out that nobody had any idea you did anything unusual.
In general, people aren’t paying as much attention to you as they’re paying to themselves. Nevertheless, when we’re focused on something about ourselves, we often assume that everyone else is focused on it, too. This is the heart of what social psychologists call the spotlight effect.
Here’s another example: I got my first pair of glasses in fifth grade. These days, I forget I’m even wearing them, but for those first couple weeks, all I could notice were the new lenses on my face. I even remember that right after we picked up my new glasses, my mom and I had to go to the mall, and the entire time, I felt self-conscious. I was sure that everyone was looking at me and my new glasses, thinking to themselves how strange they looked on me.
Now, I could be wrong, but as I look back, I don’t think anyone at that mall actually noticed my glasses that day. What mattered was that I focused on my new eyewear, and that degree of self-consciousness made it seem like everyone else must have been focused on it, too.
Adjusting to a New Environment
It’s easy to feel like you’re at the center of a spotlight anytime you adjust to a new environment. The transition to college life is one that comes with a ton of new experiences, which can be tricky to navigate.
When we’re thrust into a new environment, we tend to become more self-aware and focused on our every action. Psychologists who study culture shock have pointed to the heightened self-awareness that can accompany the adjustment to a foreign land. Your own college or university probably feels something like a foreign land—or at least it did when you first arrived.
This time of self-awareness is a perfect opportunity for the spotlight effect to emerge. Think about some of the worries you might have had when you started college. Maybe you felt as though your roommate was always judging you or that the other students in your residence hall noticed your every move. It might feel like your fellow students are scrutinizing your choices, but that fear is probably more about your own heightened self-awareness.
Turning on the Spotlight
To understand the spotlight effect and why we can be tricked into thinking other people think about us more than they actually do, let’s look to one of the scientific studies. An early published demonstration of the spotlight effect considered the everyday embarrassing experience of wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt.
Let’s back up for a second. In this study, college students were to arrive at the psychology lab in groups to fill out printed surveys in a conference room. In fact, one randomly chosen participant from each group was given an arrival time that was 5 minutes after everyone else’s, so when that person arrives, everyone else in his or her group has already been taken to another room and started filling out the survey.
When that person arrives, though, the experimenter says that he or she has to wear a t-shirt with an enormous picture of Barry Manilow’s face on it. Manilow, the researchers assure us, is “a musician who is not terribly popular among college students.” In other words, everyone’s embarrassed to wear this ridiculous t-shirt.
Boldly wearing the Barry Manilow shirt, the participant heads to the other room to meet the rest of the group. The person sits down and gets ready to take the survey when the experimenter says, “on second thought, everyone else is already pretty far ahead, so you should actually wait outside for moment.”
At this point, the researcher basically asks, “do you think anyone in that room noticed you were wearing a shirt with an enormous photograph of Barry Manilow’s face on it?” On average, people thought that about 50% of the people in the room noticed the shirt and would be able to identify the embarrassing visage gracing its fabric. However, in reality, only about 25% of people in the room actually noticed the shirt.
Participants vastly overestimated how many of the people in that room noticed the t-shirt. If you put yourself in their shoes (or t-shirts, rather), the judgment makes a lot of sense—if you were made to walk into a room wearing an embarrassing t-shirt, of course you’d think everyone noticed. But the reality is not nearly what we think it is.
Turning the Spotlight Off
In another study, when the researchers allowed some time for the participants to get used to wearing their new pop culture apparel before heading to the other room, they didn’t think that many other people noticed the shirt. This is important because it gives us insight into why the spotlight effect happens; it’s because people assume everyone else will notice something about themselves when they’re more focused on it.
When you feel embarrassed, it consumes all of your attention, and you assume that everyone else is focused on what you are focused on. If it doesn’t concern you (like the people who had a chance to forget that they were wearing the goofy t-shirt), you don’t leap to the conclusion that everyone else is paying attention to it.
So when you catch yourself thinking that everyone is paying attention to something you did, ask yourself: “is it just because I’m obsessing about it?” The reality is that all those other people who you think are paying attention to you are actually concerned with their own behavior and think you’re paying close attention to them.
Bio
Andy Luttrell is a PhD student studying social psychology at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on attitudes and persuasion, but he teaches all corners of social psychology. You can also read his weekly psychology blog, Be a People Expert
A version of this post first appeared on Andy's blog. Check it out for more great psych content!
