#the spotlight effect

[geekofreako]

6 Psychological Effects That Affect How Our Brains Tick

Interested in what influences & affects your brain and your behavior? Here are some of the most powerful psychological effects to look out for today:

1) Pratfall Effect-  These mistakes attract charm as a result of the Pratfall Effect: Those who never make mistakes are perceived as less likeable than those who commit the occasional faux pas. Messing up draws people closer to you, makes you more human. Perfection creates distance and an unattractive air of invincibility. Those of us with flaws win out every time.

2) Pygmalion Effect- . At the beginning of the year, all the students took an assessment test, and the experimenter led other teachers to believe that certain students were capable of great academic achievement. Experimenter chose these students at random, regardless of the actual results of the IQ tests.  At the end of the year, when the students were retested, the group of earmarked high achievers did indeed show improvement over their peers. Why? Later tests concluded that teachers subconsciously gave greater opportunities, attention, and feedback to the special group. Their expectations for this group were higher, and their expectations created the reality.

The applications for the Pygmalion Effect can have benefits for both personal development and leadership. Individually, you can challenge yourself with more difficult goals and tasks in an effort to rise to meet the challenge. As a leader, when you expect great things of your team, you may see improved performance in return.

3) Paradox of choice- Happiness is diminished with the extra effort and stress it takes to weigh multiple options, opportunity cost affects the way we value items, pressure to choose can be draining, and the possibility of blame exists should the decision not turn out how we had hoped.

4) Bystander effect/ “confusion of responsibility” -diffused responsibility: They assume someone else will pick up the slack.

5) Spotlight Effect-To test the Spotlight Effect, a team of psychologists at Cornell asked a group of test subjects to wear an embarrassing T-shirt (featuring a picture of Barry Manilow’s face) and estimate how many other people had noticed what they were wearing. The estimations of the test subjects were twice as high as the actual number.

6) Focusing Effect- people make decisions on the basis of the most pronounced and distinct information they have available in their working memory, and for this reason, other pieces of possibly useful information are excluded. So, the decision is only based on fractions of the total amount of knowledge or information that one has stored. 

The easiest way to handle it is to start asking yourself questions. “What happened last time I did that?” “Is it reasonable to assume that that single action caused that outcome?” “If not, what else might have contributed to that outcome?” “How many other factors were in play?”

[micahbuzan]

The Spotlight Effect. Thinking people are paying attention to your every move can be crippling for creativity. There's a wide gap between perceptions and reality. Understanding that no one really cares about what you do in the way you may think they do can be liberating. Be sure to click the bell icon to be notified of future vids.

[rbnyw]

The Spotlight Effect

"Is the tendency of an individual to overestimate the extent to which others are paying attention to the individual's appearance and behavior. That is, people believe that they are in the “spotlight” and that everyone is paying attention to them."

[ghostsinyourteeth]

Playing sports in middle age against college students can be humbling. Playing basketball the other day, I was playing defense against a taller, quicker, and well, younger guy. He accelerated to the basket, and trying to stay in front of him, I lost my footing and unceremoniously fell on my butt. I bounced a couple of times before coming to a stop. Nobody said anything, and my first thought was that everyone was privately laughing.

I was mortified, but as I got up I reminded myself of a psychological phenomenon that always helps me get through embarrassing moments. The trick also works when I'm worried about the impression I will make in a new setting.

The phenomenon, called the "spotlight effect," refers to the fact that people considerably overestimate how much attention other people are paying to them. Being the center of our own worlds, our own actions and words loom quite large in our perception, but the spotlight effect reminds us that we simply do not loom quite as large in the eyes of others.

In a 2000 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Tom Gilovich and colleagues demonstrated this phenomenon empirically. In one study, the researchers brought in groups of students to complete an unrelated task in the same room, and randomly assigned one of the students to put on an embarrassing t-shirt (if you must know, it was a t-shirt of Barry Manilow, which the reseachers had previously established was highly embarrassing for this college population). The researchers asked the students wearing the t-shirt to estimate the percentage of people in the group who would be able to identify the person on the t-shirt. While the students placed their estimates around 50 percent, in reality only 25 percent were able to identify Barry Manilow. Importantly, when other students were asked to watch videotapes of these groups and produce a similar estimate, their estimates were also around 25 percent. Thus, it seems that wearing the t-shirt specifically had the effect of heightening the perception that other people pay more attention to us than they actually do.

The effects went beyond Barry Manilow: in a second study, participants were allowed to choose a non-embarrassing t-shirt, this time with a picture of Bob Marley, Jerry Seinfeld, or Martin Luther King Jr. Again, the t-shirt wearers estimated that 50 percent of others would be able to identify the person who picture they were wearing. In this study, less than 10 percent of their group members actually did. A third study extended the findings to behavior, showing that in a group conversation, people regularly overestimate how much people notice their brilliant contributions-- or their embarrassing feet in their mouths.

The reeasons for the spotlight effect, as I alluded to earlier, have to do with the salience of our own actions in our own perceptions. People (generally) of course know that they are not the center of everybody else's universe. But when we do something atypical, either good or bad, we tend not to sufficiently correct for the difference between our own and other peoples' perceptions.

The take-home message, I hope, is clear: when you find yourself mortified or overly worried about the impression you'll make, remember that other people simply don't pay as much attention to you as you think they do. Your conversational faux-pas will not linger in their memories, and that coffee stain on your shirt is unlikely to be a conversational topic at the water cooler. You will not make or break a first impression on the basis of one particularly brilliant or embarrassing thing you say.

This is not to say that people don't notice you at all; only that people do not process information about you as deeply as you do. In other words, while you're stuck ruminating, people have likely moved on. No big deal.

I should know: I ran into one of the players on the court from a few days ago at a cafeteria, and mentioned how embarrassed I was after falling on my butt. His response? I kid you not: "Really? I don't remember that."

[bitesizedpsych-blog]

The spotlight effect

is the tendency for people to exaggerate how much and many others notice their mistakes and shortcomings. In one study, participants exaggerated the percentage of observers who noticed an embarrassing t-shirt by up to six times.