Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?

by Julie Smith

Living a life of people-pleasing is further complicated by the fact that other people don’t always voice their disapproval with criticism. We can fear and feel disapproval even when the other person never says a word. When we don’t have that information, our mind starts to fill in the blanks for us. The spotlight effect is a term originally coined by Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky (2000) to describe the tendency of humans to overestimate how much others are focused on us. We are each at the centre of our own spotlight of attention and we tend to imagine that others are focused on us too, when in reality, everyone’s spotlights are usually on themselves. So we can often make the assumption that others are judging us negatively or disapproving when they may not be thinking about us at all.