The Spotlight Effect

There was a small dispute in my comments over how one can dress to a business causal office (FWIW, in the photo shown, i would swap the tan sport coat for navy and tuck in collar if i were going to an office). But it reminded me of a social experiment done in the late 1990s 🧵 pic.twitter.com/3qhYgIyxEq

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) July 16, 2023

The thread leads to the Spotlight Effect.  From Wikipedia.  The whole entry is worth reading.

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 one's own world, an accurate evaluation of how much one is noticed by others is uncommon. The reason for the spotlight effect is the innate tendency 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.

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.

I encounter this a lot related to the common manifestation of people mind reading.  Person B does something that in some way affects Person A.  

Person A makes the assumption that the action and consequence was deliberate (often debatable) and then leaps to the conclusion based on presumptive mind reading that "Person B did that because . . . "  

Because he doesn't like me.

Because he doesn't care about other people.

Because he doesn't pay attention.

Because he's a jerk.

Because angry and inconsiderate.

Because I'm a man/woman.

Because I criticized X.

Because he's always in a hurry because he thinks his time is more valuable than everyone else's.  

Ad infinitum.  

Sometimes it was just an accident, there was no intent.  Sometimes there was no action, Person B just perceives there to have been.  And usually, the consequence has little to do with the presumed cause.  It is all projection and assumption.  

It has the same asymmetry as the Spotlight effect.  How we interpret the world's signals is different from how others interpret those signals.