Tom Gilovich On the Spotlight Effect

Tom Gilovich finds it fun to study the whys and wherefores of how human beings make sense of the information delivered by the world around them. And why not, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “We’re dynamic, very complicated creatures who do all sorts of things and sometimes make you go, ‘Huh?’ That’s interesting.”

He adds, “At the same time, some of the things that people do have great consequences,” which means understanding how understandings come about also has great import.

“A lot of the research on judgment and decision making is that there’s a schism between the rational choice and the psychologically compelling choice,” Gilovich continues, “and that has provided fertile ground for psychologists like me to explore it: “OK, this is what the rational analysis suggests. Why don’t we do that?” And there’s often some interesting psychological answers to that. Doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes lots of psychological sense.”

In that spirit, Edmonds and Gilovich, the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, run through what Edmonds calls “the greatest hits” of Gilovich’s research findings. These include the “spotlight effect,” which posits that individuals often assume others pay more attention to them than they are, and its cousin, “the illusion of transparency,” in which people assume others recognize their feelings and emotions accurately. They also look at regret, bias blind spots, and why third-place finishers are happier than second-place ones.

Gilovich is the co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. He’s written or co-written several books, ranging from the academic (the textbook Social Psychology written with Dacher Keitner, Serena Chen and Richard Nisbett), titles that bridge academia and the general public (2002’s The psychology of intuitive judgment: Heuristic and biases written alongside Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman), and books that bring psychological insights directly to the public (such as 1999’s Why smart people make big money mistakes—and how to correct them: Lessons from the new science of behavioral economics with Gary Belsky and 2015’s The wisest in the room: How you can benefit from social psychology’s most powerful insights with Lee Ross).

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click on the link. The transcript of the conversation appears below. 

David Edmonds: How sensitive are you to what others think about you?

Thomas Gilovich, who teaches at Cornell University, has contributed to a remarkable number of areas in psychology. One area of research reveals that other people are much less interested in you than you probably realize. Thomas Gilovich, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Tom Gilovich: Pleasure to be here.

David Edmonds: So some psychologists are famous for making one major discovery, but you’re well known for many, and I thought in this interview we could go through a few of them, your kind of selected highlights, as it were, and start with a phenomenon known as the spotlight effect. Can you explain what that is?

Tom Gilovich: Yes, it’s the feeling that the social spotlight shines brighter on you than it actually does. That we feel that we are the object of other people’s attention more than we actually are.

The good news, if that feeling produces lots of social anxiety, which it does in many people, is that people are busy with their own lives and their own concerns, so they’re spending less time thinking about you than you think they are.

David Edmonds: And I think your original paper on this, correct me, if I’m wrong, is over 25 years old now. So I just wonder whether you had any reason to rethink any aspect of it?

Tom Gilovich: I think there’s some remaining questions to be addressed, but nothing I’ve learned qualifies or challenges that original idea. Of course, there are times when you are the object of people’s attention. If you’re a tennis player and the match is tied and you’re serving, you know that everyone who happens to be there is paying attention to you. And one of the observations that led to, “Hey, we should pursue this,” is even when you’re not in those situations, it can feel like that. When you’re at a cocktail party and you have nobody to talk to, even though everyone’s busy in their own conversations, it feels like everyone is looking at you and wondering “What’s wrong with him? Can’t he find anyone to talk to?”

David Edmonds: And I love one of the ways in which you got to this result, which was dressing subjects in outrageous clothing and seeing how they thought people would respond to that.

Tom Gilovich: Yes, although it’s interesting, you say outrageous clothing because we put them in a T-shirt with a very popular, famous pop singer that wasn’t especially popular to a college audience. So there was nothing outrageous about it, but these college students would think that, “Ooh, this isn’t cool here on this campus.” I won’t mention the pop singer’s name, but the fact that it wasn’t outrageous and still produced these effects, I think, serves as a testimony to the power of this spotlight effect. Even minor deviations from the local norm, what’s cool and what not can make us feel like all eyes are upon us?

David Edmonds: So you would ask people who were wearing this image of this singer, how many people do they think have observed them? And then you would ask passersby whether they’d spotted it.

Tom Gilovich: Yes, the true participant in the experiment came to the laboratory individually, and we had them wear this shirt, and we said the experiments already started. There are another number of people in another room. We’d like you to go in there and catch up. They walk into that room, there are a bunch of other people, other true subjects in the experiment, sitting around a table. This subject, who we’re most interested in, goes to sit down, and as they’re about to sit down, a second experimenter in that room says, “You know what? This isn’t going to work. You’re not going to be able to catch up to the other people. Why don’t you go back and talk to the first experimenter, they’ll figure out something for you to do to get your experimental credit.” And then that person exits the room and is asked to estimate the number of people in the room in which they just appeared briefly who could tell us who’s on their shirt, and they massively overestimate.

David Edmonds: Now you showed something quite similar when people do a repeated task. So for example, when a lecturer gives the same lecture each year, and that lecturer knows whether they’ve performed that lecture on that day very well, or whether they’ve stumbled or whatever, and they think the audience can notice. But in fact, it turns out the audience is oblivious to this different performance from year to year, or from week to week, or from month to month.

Tom Gilovich: Yeah, I like the example that you use there, because of course, the audience is different. They’re not going to know that, “Oh, you were a little bit weak this year compared to last year.” But nonetheless, we feel it that way. But we have that same reaction when the audience is the same. The whole phenomenon of this term that’s used of, “Oh, I’m having a bad hair day,” speaks to that. That is even when you run into the people you normally associate with, you’re feeling like, “Oh, my hair looks terrible today.” Everyone’s going to notice and think, “What’s up with him today?” but you’re you to them. You’re not your hair, and they’re not likely to notice any variance in your hair.

And we did it with sports participants as well, that you have good days and bad days, and your teammates notice it to some degree, especially if it’s extreme, but they aren’t hanging on your performance nearly as much as you think. They’ve got their own performances to worry about, and so it largely goes unnoticed to them.

David Edmonds: The good news, I guess, is that it’s kind of liberating, right? We can go through life not under a microscope. We should feel much freer than we might otherwise we’re not being observed very closely by other people.

Tom Gilovich: Yeah, I find it liberating. And I’ve had a number of people who I don’t know, strangers come up to me, and Ithaca is a small town, so somehow I’m identified, and people have come in, “Are you the person who did the research on this?” And I’ll get a little nervous, like, “Oh, they’re going to say something,” kind of manifesting the spotlight effect myself, “Uh oh.” And many times when I’ve had that reaction, the person has said, “I just want to thank you. I used to be so worried about X, Y and Z. Now I think about this spotlight effect and go about my business with less anxiety.”

David Edmonds: I want to move on to another area you’ve written about, which is regret. You’ve shown that there’s a difference between regret about actions and regret about inactions. Perhaps you can just explain what that difference is. But also I’m interested to know whether there’s any connection between that and what we’ve been talking about so far, the spotlight effect and our variation in performance. Or are these completely disconnected topics?

Tom Gilovich: That’s a great question. And no, they are connected. That is, I began the research on the spotlight effect as a result of the research on regret, and at the time I started it, the general consensus is that we regret things we did more than things we failed to do, even if they have exactly the same consequences. So if you bought a stock and ended up losing lots of money, you would kick yourself and go, “Why did I do that? Why did I take on that risk that was a stupid move. If I just kept my money, I’d be richer.” Now that hurts more than if you thought about buying a stock you decided not to, and it took off and you ended up losing – opportunity-cost-wise — the same amount of money we all feel that the pain of action is greater than the pain of inaction there. Or in student life, if you’re taking a multiple choice test and you think the right answer is A, and then a little voice in the back of your head says, well, now wait a minute, maybe it’s C. If you switch to C and got it wrong and a was the right answer. Of course, you’re going to be really hard on yourself, whereas staying with A and C is the right answer. That hurts too, but not nearly as much. Action is just much more powerful than inaction.

That was the received wisdom, and it’s right to some degree. Nevertheless, if you ask people, older people who’ve accumulated some regrets, what are the biggest regrets in your life, what comes to mind most quickly are the things they didn’t do. “Oh, I didn’t finish that degree.” “I should have gone into this line of work rather than that.” “She’s the one who got away that I was too timid to ever ask her out on a date.” Blah, blah, blah. And so what our research was, how do we reconcile those two things? And what we documented was a temporal pattern to the experience of regret that in the short term, action regrets hurt more than inaction regrets, but inaction regrets have this kind of staying power. “I should have pursued that degree.” And you imagine and you embellish and maybe even exaggerate over time, all the great things that would have happened if you had done that, the pain of action, you take it right up front and what the problems are known, circumscribed, so they don’t grow, whereas the regrets of inaction can grow.

The connection between that and the spotlight effect is the seemingly straightforward interpretation of the inaction regret idea is, look, if you’re going to end up regretting the things that you didn’t do, you should embrace the Nike slogan, “Just do it” and take more chances and so on, and that’s a little risky. Just doing it could lead to bankruptcy or even incarceration. So I was on a hike in New Zealand. We were near the end. We were by a stream that we all knew was really cold, but we were hot, and you faced the hiking dilemma, do I plunge into the cold water or not? And there was this Australian guy, as I was deliberating whether to take the plunge or not, who said, “Well, you never regret a swim.” And he plunged in, and then I followed, and I love the fact that I did.

Mostly that’s true, but of course, it’s not strictly true. Some people have had to swim and tragically have drowned and so on, and so you can’t fully embrace the Nike slogan. But what we found in lots of people’s regrets of inaction, they were produced by a fear of the social consequences. I’m not getting out on the dance floor, because what will I look like? People will mock me and so on. No people are busy with their own dancing, et cetera.

And so there’s a qualified version. If what’s holding you back are concerns about other people’s view of you, which we have to honor to some degree. But maybe you’re honoring that too much. Maybe you want to think more about that and take those kinds of social chances a little bit more.

David Edmonds: Right. I mean, I guess some philosophers might say there’s some kind of irrationality going on here, because if the consequences are the same, it doesn’t matter whether it comes through an action or comes through an inaction.

Tom Gilovich: Yeah. Well, a lot of the research on judgment and decision making is that there’s a schism between the rational choice and the psychologically compelling choice, and that has provided fertile ground for psychologists like me to explore it. “OK, this is what the rational analysis suggests. Why don’t we do that?” And there’s often some interesting psychological answers to that. Doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes lots of psychological sense.

David Edmonds: Well, that makes a kind of sense. So let’s move on to another area of research. The link is even more obvious here, which is the illusion of transparency. Tell me about that.

Tom Gilovich: Yeah, well, our analysis of the spotlight effect is you’re feeling something very powerfully. “Oh, my God, I’m wearing this embarrassing T-shirt. What are other people going to think?” You might even think, well, other people are somewhat busy. They’re not going to be as focused on it as I am. So you adjust to some degree, but those adjustments tend to be insufficient, because you’ve got this powerful internal state — “Oh, my God.” Well, if that’s true about our beliefs, about what we’re doing or wearing, and what other people think it’s likely to be true about what we’re feeling. We’re feeling some powerful emotion, and because it’s such a strong feeling that we’re having, it’s hard to get in the head of someone looking at us. It feels like we’re leaking out all over the place. The signs to my embarrassment or pride or whatever it is, are available for all to see.

And as you pointed out, some of this can be liberating knowledge of the spotlight effect. At times that can be liberating about this illusion of transparency. We did a study where we told people, right before they were asked to deliver an extemporaneous speech, we told half of them about the illusion of transparency and had the other half just give their speech. And part of the reason people are nervous about public speaking is they’re nervous about appearing nervous. And if we convince them that, yeah, you might be nervous, but it’s less obvious than you think, there’s one less thing for you to worry about and makes you a more confident speaker. And that’s exactly what we showed. We videotaped them and showed them to people in the business of evaluating public speakers, and they were rated more highly if they were informed of the illusion of transparency.

David Edmonds: That’s very interesting. I can see how it would be comforting to know that people aren’t paying as much attention as we believe that they are and that our nervousness or our embarrassment isn’t so conspicuous to other people. How did you test that? How did you determine how accurate people were about our inner emotions?

Tom Gilovich: Well, we did it in several ways, the simplest to describe is we basically had a round-robin lie detection study where we had, let’s say, in a typical session of the experiment, five people show up. They take turns coming to the end of the table. They would read a little card that would ask them a question, “Where did you go on your last vacation?” And then under the question, it would say, truth or lie, you tell the truth or you lie. And in any round, there are five people. Four people are asked to tell the truth. One person is asked to lie. At the end of it, all of the truth tellers are asked to guess who the liar was, and the liar is asked to guess how many of those people identified them as the liar, and people are off by basically 100%. They would estimate that twice as many people would identify them than was actually the case.

David Edmonds: OK, we’re moving rapidly through your different research areas. I want to talk briefly about the bias blind spot. So can you explain what that is and how you tested for it?

Tom Gilovich: Yeah, we all know that there’s the potential for bias of a whole bunch of different kinds in a whole bunch of different contexts. If you stand to gain from one thing being true rather than another, it’s going to be hard for you to think that that one thing isn’t true. Your preferences, your past experience, your rooting interest, all of those things can bias judgment, and we know that because we’ve seen it. And the bias blind spot refers to the fact that we see it mostly in other people, or it’s easier to see in other people. I can see your biases. It’s harder to see my own. The blind spot is detecting bias in the self.

We did a variety of studies to show that that we think, “Yeah, I’ve got some special connection to this issue. My parents came from that country,” or “my parents make this amount of money,” or “I’m left-handed versus right-handed,” or whatever my special status is. If you have that same special status, I think of that as a source of bias in your judgment. I don’t think of it as a source of bias in my judgment.

And in many cases, and the most extreme cases, we think of it as a source of insight. No one could understand what it’s like. No one can appreciate this issue unless they’ve walked in my shoes. They know the issue the way I know the issue. So that really blinds us to our own biases.

Dave Edmonds: It’s interesting because it seems to conflict in some ways, with the illusion of transparency. So there we had a case of us knowing ourselves and other people not being able to observe us as well as we understood ourselves. But what you’re just talking about there is us being able to identify bias in others, but being blind to our own bias.

Tom Gilovich: Yes, that’s right, and I think that stems from two sources. One is you can ask, what is the job of this processing software we have in the head? What is the mind’s job or the brain’s job? It’s to make sense of the world, and it does that extremely well, and a lot of that sense making has to be super-fast, because we’ve got quick decisions to make. And therefore a lot of it is automatic, and we don’t have access to it, so what we’re left with is the sense, not the sense making. And therefore, it seems to us that we’re seeing the world the way that it is, and when other people say that they’re seeing it differently, well, the source of disagreement has to be in them, because I’m seeing the world. The great U.S. comedian George Carlin put this very nicely when he said that, “have you ever noticed that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?” And it’s brilliant, because, of course, you’re trying to drive in accordance with what the road conditions afford. So you, almost by the very nature, are driving appropriately. It’s going to seem that way to you. And therefore, anyone going faster is a maniac. Anyone going slower is going too slow. He’s so right about that. That’s the way we experience people driving differently than we. But that metaphor of the driver too fast and too slow, it applies everywhere. You know, if we go to the political arena, we feel like, “No, we’ve assessed the situation. We have it right.” So if some people want to bring about social change, let’s say faster than we do. “We think, Oh, this is going to backfire. The world isn’t ready for that. You’re going too fast. I can embrace the spirit, but that’s wrong headed.” Or if other people are dragging their feet, “Come on. You’re not paying attention to what the world demands.” So it applies, really, everywhere.

David Edmonds: So is this a demand for certain sort of humility?

Tom Gilovich: I think so. Awareness of the bias blind spot, the whole area of research on judgment and decision making calls, for more intellectual humility than, let’s say, the average person can muster. And it’s particularly pronounced, or possibly particularly important, in today’s world, where you see so much of the opposite of that humility, a certain sort of overconfidence or even hubris, and some of the actions that have been taken on the world stage seem to be hubristic.

David Edmonds: These findings that you have about bias and transparency and the spotlight effect and so on, are they universal findings about human beings at all times? Are they about human beings in the 20th and 21st century? Are they findings about Americans? How broad do we think these findings apply?

Tom Gilovich: Well, it’s an excellent question, and it’s a question that psychologists ask themselves a lot. Any one psychologist can only do so much. The average case is someone in a given country somewhere does a study, and then you wonder, is this true across the world? And there have been some qualifications of some biases, in particular with respect to people in more interdependent societies, do they differ in how they think from people in independent societies? Lot of exciting research in that area, but it’s an open question. All of these things should be examined across different age groups, across different cultures. Harder to study it across different time periods, but not impossible.

Let’s go back to the spotlight effect. When we did that research, we thought it was most pronounced in the pre-teen and teen years. When we say that everyone reacts and the way you’re reacting, nodding your head, yeah, sure. I remember being especially self-conscious then, and we do have some evidence from our data that that is true, just nowhere near as strong as we thought. We thought living a long life we’d near the end, realize people aren’t paying attention to us as much, and it really doesn’t disappear as much as we thought.

David Edmonds: But you would think that of all the effects we’ve been talking about today, you would think that the spotlight effect was very culturally determined, in the sense that some societies are more introverted than other societies, that some societies there’s a greater sense of shame and so on, than other societies. So you would have thought that you might get very different results in different places.

Tom Gilovich: Yes, you could imagine it going in either of two ways. In the independent societies, we sort of teach people your job is to stand out. Your job is to actualize your full potential. And the message there is, it’s me, me, me, and that could encourage a great spotlight effect. What are people thinking of me? Now, let’s go to an interdependent society. There’s less emphasis on you as an individual, so maybe that’s less of a spotlight. Or, as you point out, no, I’m in an interdependent society, it’s important that I meet my obligations, I do my duties, and so on. So stepping outside of what I’m supposed to do — that is really going to draw other people’s attention.

So let’s just say we do lots of extensive research on the spotlight effect in the East versus West, versus independent versus interdependent cultures, and we find nothing. It could be that both things are true and they’re canceling each other out.

David Edmonds: Final question. I’m intrigued, across all these areas that you’ve been looking at, what it is that motivates you as a psychologist, what it is that drives you? What aspects of human psychology are you most curious about?

Tom Gilovich: Well, I mean, there’s two answers to that question. One is, it’s a great privilege to be a research psychologist, where you can study whatever you want. And so when you’re out in the world and something makes you go, huh? That’s interesting. That’s curious. So one thing we haven’t talked about is prior experience of watching the Olympic Games and seeing that the second-place finisher doesn’t seem as happy as the third-place finisher, even though they did better. Huh? Why would that be? And that led to some of the psychology of counterfactual thinking that makes that perfectly psychologically explainable.

So part of the answer to that question is, what is it about human social life, in particular, we’re dynamic, very complicated creatures who do all sorts of things and sometimes make you go, huh? That’s interesting. What is that about? That’s why science is fun. And other people have that fun thinking about genetic determinants of life on Earth, etc. But for me, seeing it play out in the everyday world, that’s a great privilege.

At the same time, some of the things that people do have great consequences. Judgment decision-making plays out in policy decisions, in electoral decisions, etc. And so it’s impossible to ignore that and to try to think about what are the biases, let’s say that play a big role in making some political messages work really well, and others fall on deaf ears. So thinking about what makes a good policy, not only instrumentally good, but popular. What can make a good policy not so popular? Those are important questions.

David Edmonds: Well, thanks for talking us through some of your greatest hits. Tom Gilovich, thank you very much indeed.

Tom Gilovich: Thank you. It really was a pleasure.