Spotlight Effect

Coined by psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky in their 2000 paper "The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment", published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across five experiments, they demonstrated that people overestimate how much others notice their appearance and actions. Participants wearing potentially embarrassing T-shirts overestimated observers' recall, and discussants overestimated how prominent their comments were to others. The effect stems from anchoring on one's rich phenomenological experience and insufficiently adjusting for others' perspectives.