The Spotlight Effect: How You Think You Come Across… and How You Actually Do

Can you remember the last day you moved through as though you were walking on air?
Everything you did, every interaction you had came with the feeling that you were the aura in the
room. Don’t we all love days like those.

Can you remember the last day you moved through feeling like you were wading through syrup?
Everything you did, every interaction you had came with the feeling that you had zero aura in the
room. Don’t we all hate days like those.

In between, there are many days which contain good moments and bad ones and many average
ones which fail to make it into the memory bank. However, we tend to judge ourselves based on
our highs and lows, with the lows often taking a dominant role here, and this is hyper sensitised
under the lens of social media culture.

So it’s worth taking a moment to step back and consider that how other people perceive us
more often than not differs from how we perceive ourselves. This extends to both positive and
negative aspects, although for most of us it’s the sense of negative perception that we dwell on.
Sometimes all it takes is one comment to throw our orbit into a spin and send us crashing down
– you thought you were being fficient, but someone makes a joke about you being a control
freak. They think nothing more of it. Meanwhile you fixate on the words and the rest of your day
spirals into introspection and self-doubt.

At the turn of the century, the psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky identified
the spotlight effect which focused on the tendency for people to overestimate how much others
notice and evaluate them. Put simply, we assume the spotlight is shining far more brightly on us
than it actually is.

This makes sense of course. We are the main character in our own lives, living with ourselves
24/7. For most other people however, we’re just NPCs (Non-Player Characters in Millennial/Gen
Z slang!), passing through their own main character arcs and they have far too much going on in
their own lives to dwell on a faux pas from you.

There is a flip-side to these distorted self-views. Just as we can over inflate the negatives, we can
also overestimate how memorable we are when things go well. There are those who leave
meetings assuming their contribution stood out in the minds of others – we’ve all replayed
barnstorming contributions we’ve made in a meeting. Sadly, we’ve probably been
overestimating again as most people in the room will be more focused on their own
performances to remember your floor-stopping comments.

So how can you change that perception and influence how other people see you? Most
importantly, be authentic. Pete Hegseth, the current US defence secretary is a personality who
gives off the vibe of trying to be something (confident, strong, assured), but coming across as
something else (arrogant, performatively macho and surly) according to critics.

This performance aspect and the prevalence of main character syndrome in social media
culture may seem like a position of strength, but in actual fact ‘real’ impressions are made far
more subtly. Often, it’s not about what was said, but the impression that was left behind.