Spotlight Effect

By Yiler Huang

The spotlight effect describes the situation in which a person thinks they are being watched and noticed by other people, as if there is a spotlight shone on them to tell other people to pay attention to them. It is a very common thinking bias and can be sometimes hard to avoid. This is because most people pay attention to themselves, and they would think that if they are paying attention to themselves, others are probably doing the same.

One thing people are often self-conscious of is when we make mistakes. When we make a mistake in public (such as tripping on a rock, spilling a drink etc.), we would often think that people are paying attention to us. This is likely because we often pay a lot of attention to our mistakes, and we might think that other people are conscious about it too because of that. Another thing this effect often happens with is when you are performing in public, such as a speech or a musical performance. We often think that there are people paying attention to us when we are performing, because we usually pay a lot of attention to ourselves during performances.

This effect is also more commonly observed among younger people. This could be due to the fact that we pay more attention to our own social situation when we are younger, which makes us think that there are other people examining our behaviors all the time.

I had also experienced this effect. When I walk in public, I would pay attention to the way I walk and check if I am walking weirdly because I thought people might notice the way I walk. However, most of the time it was just an illusion created by the spotlight effect. To avoid this effect, we need to remind ourselves that there are actually not that many people who would pay attention to other people, and there is no need to worry about making a mistake since other people would likely forget it anyways.