The Spotlight Effect and the Illusion of Transparency: Egocentric Assessments of How We Are Seen by Others

We review a program of research that examines people's judgments about how they are seen by others. The research indicates that people tend to anchor on their own experience when making such judgments, with the result that their assessments are often egocentrically biased. Our review focuses on two biases in particular, the spotlight effect, or people's tendency tooverestimate the extent to which their behavior and appearance are noticed and evaluated by others, and the illusion of transparency, or people's tendency to overestimate the extent to which their internal states "leak out" and are detectable by others.