A closer look
Spotlight effect is the psychological phenomenon by which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are. Coined in 1999 by Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky, research showed that when participants were forced to wear a highly embarrassing t-shirt into a room full of peers, they drastically overestimated how many people actually noticed or cared. Because we are the center of our own universes, we incorrectly project that egocentric viewpoint onto everyone else. You might spend the entire day agonizing over a minor coffee stain on your jeans, entirely unaware that literally every other human being you walked past is too busy worrying about their own coffee stains to even perceive your existence. It is both incredibly depressing and massively liberating to realize that nobody is actually paying attention to your social blunders, because everyone is trapped in their own private theater where they are the star of an anxiety-inducing solo performance
