An embarrassing T-shirt, a bad hair day, a shaking voice, spilled groceries. In all four situations it feels like everyone is looking at us. Guess how many people actually notice.
Your own estimateYour guess against the results of experiments. It measures nothing about you, it just shows how people usually get it wrong.
Situation 1 of 4
You walk into a room with 10 people wearing a T-shirt with an embarrassing picture. Tap the ones you think will notice.
In the embarrassing T-shirt experiment, students expected about half of the people in the room to notice. About a quarter did: 46% against 23% (Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky, 2000). The other three situations went the same way: looking worse than usual, nervousness while speaking, and a public mishap.
We start from how we experience the situation ourselves. We feel our own T-shirt, voice or spilled basket constantly and fully. When we guess how others see it, we adjust too little from that experience. For you, the embarrassing T-shirt lasts all day. For others, a few seconds, before they go back to what they're dealing with themselves.
Others don't see your worst day. They see your average.
Knowing this helps. Speakers who were told in advance that nervousness shows less than it feels went on to give better talks (Savitsky and Gilovich, 2003).
One caveat. The experiments were about strangers and acquaintances. A partner, children or close friends notice more, and that's fine.
ContinuedEveryone is busy with their own universe →See what's going on in the heads of the people around you. Related articleDo they see you the same way? →Guess how many friends see you the way you see yourself. Then find out at a table.How it works
The quiz compares your guess with the results of the studies. Only the T-shirt has numbers: the 15 people wearing the shirt expected on average 46% of those present to identify it, 23% did (study 1, 64 observers in groups of 2–6). So in a room of 10 people, two “notice” and a third “maybe”. Guessing 3 or more people counts as overestimating. For the other situations the studies show the direction of the result (we overestimate), not exact shares, so the first two options count as overestimating. The spilled-basket scene is an illustration; the experiments used setting off a library alarm, arriving at a party without a gift, carrying a bag from a cheap store, and failing a task in front of a stranger.
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Sources
- Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H. and Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222
- Gilovich, T., Kruger, J. and Medvec, V. H. (2002). The spotlight effect revisited: Overestimating the manifest variability of our actions and appearance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38(1), 93–99
- Savitsky, K. and Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(6), 618–625
- Savitsky, K., Epley, N. and Gilovich, T. (2001). Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 44–56
- Gloth, C. (2011). The Illusion of Transparency and Public Speaking: A Study of Social Anxiety. Master's thesis, Minnesota State University, Mankato
