Observer's Illusion of Transparency

Psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Husted Medvec introduced the term in a 1998 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their experiments showed that liars overestimated how detectable their lies were, and that people believed feelings of disgust were far more legible to onlookers than they actually were. Working from Cornell University, Gilovich and Savitsky attributed the effect to anchoring — people adjust too little from the vivid anchor of their own inner experience when imagining an outside view.