Imagine you are late for work or a special invitation! It is your priority to get to where you need to be as fast as possible. You don’t have time for your care, that’s why your hair is messy and there is a small trace of outer paste on your trousers. The sentences that come to your mind are as follows. “Oh my God, as if it wasn’t enough that I’m late, I’m going to be embarrassed because of my hair and my trousers.” So, are you going to be disgraced? No, you won’t. People feel stressed when they think they have a flawed appearance, and this will cause them to be unable to behave naturally in their environment. As you can see in the title, the Spotlight effect is what makes us think that all eyes are on us. In this article, we wanted to explain the “Spotlight Effect” to you by giving examples and avoiding terminological information. Here are the details…
What is the Spotlight Effect?
The tendency for people to feel more salient than they normally are is called the spotlight effect. Imagine you are late for class, the teacher has entered the classroom and have you ever felt that all your classmates are looking at you when you enter the classroom? Or let’s give an example similar to the example we gave in the introduction paragraph. An extraordinary meeting is being held at the company you work for and you go to this meeting with messy hair and everyone is looking at you. You’ve most likely experienced these types of situations, and it’s perfectly normal to feel and think this way.
The first focus of everyone’s life is themselves, right? We tend to be more focused on ourselves than other people, and that is why we don’t pay much attention to other people. The spotlight effect is a phenomenon that explains this situation as a pinpoint shot. Since no one can see us as ourselves, they are not even aware of our mistakes or flaws. People feel this wave of work in an exaggerated way because they put themselves in the middle of their lives.
The phenomenon, also known as the Spotlight Effect, was introduced by Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky in 1999. Spotlight was first published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science in 1999.
An experiment regarding the Spotlight effect was conducted at Cornell University in America, and some students were made to wear a T-shirt with a photo of a musician who is not very popular in America. The students in a hall mingled with the crowd and after wandering around for a while, the experts called the students back. Students wearing the t-shirts claimed that half the room they were in noticed them, but was it so? At the end of the experiment, a small majority of the students in the hall noticed those people and this number was 6 times more than the students wearing the t-shirts thought. Taking this phenomenon, which sometimes keeps our minds busy for hours, within your normal limits does not completely eliminate the Spotlight effect. However, it would be beneficial for you to have a calmer nature in this regard.
As a result, the spotlight effect reveals that the things that worry, and embarrass us in a certain part of our lives are the product of our exaggeration. The more we restrain this effect; We have a more unpressured and free mindset in our social relationships. I hope what we wrote has made you feel a little freer, dear reader.
Thank you for reading!
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