Since you have not worried yourself sick over me during the last six weeks, it is worth talking about how much other people think about you.
- You did not worry yourself sick that I have not published a new long post in recent weeks. It crossed my mind that you might have, of course, even though you most likely did not even notice.
- This is only interesting because, due to a cognitive bias, you may overestimate in exactly the same way how much your surroundings think about you, and especially about your missteps.
- That can create tension and bad feelings, which can even lead you to keep away from all sorts of social situations so you do not land in something embarrassing.
Read on for the details. You cannot fully opt out of the bias, but you can become aware when the process kicks in and step away from it.
The talk, in writing
In this episode I would like to talk about how much we think about each other. More precisely, about what we think about how much others are occupied with us.
Let me start by giving away the punchline and bringing the scientific explanation first. There is a cognitive bias called the spotlight effect. It says that people consistently overestimate how much others pay attention to them and think about them. That is really interesting, because everyone’s mind works in a way that it is busy with its own behavior, its own thoughts and the impression it makes on others, and with a clever move it projects that straight onto its surroundings. So we assume that others think about us exactly as much as we think about ourselves.
It follows that people become incredibly sensitive about the idea that every eye and every bit of attention is surely on them, in every situation. Even after a situation is over, we imagine everyone is still replaying how we behaved. And this becomes especially painful when things do not go perfectly.
Something embarrassing happens and we feel awful about it. To exaggerate a little, we feel the ground opening under us and we are going to sink with shame. Say we bombed a presentation, or noticed too late that we had gotten food all over our sweater at home and strolled around the office like that all day. That we feel bad about it is one thing, but we also assume that everyone else is surely busy with it constantly and gossiping about it. That creates a huge tension in us, which can lead to anxiety and to keeping ourselves away from all kinds of situations so we do not land in something unpleasant.
The reason I am bringing this phenomenon to you is that it recently came up in a workplace conversation, and it showed not only that someone can make themselves feel bad with it, but that it can have a negative effect on relationships too. A manager told me that their team received a request from a sister department: “Listen, guys, we are working on a project and we would need your help. It would be great if you could do this for us this week.” The request reached the team somewhere around the middle of the week, maybe on Wednesday. They knew they were incredibly busy, since they were working on loads of things anyway. When the request came, they immediately thought that someone could only imagine they could take on this much extra work if they saw them as doing nothing and twiddling their thumbs. And how untrue that is! How unfair that nobody here appreciates them, and the rest of the company can choke on it.
The manager tended to empathize with the team, and thought they surely were not standing up for their people enough toward the other departments. So the drama started to build. That is when I told them: listen, you are falling right into the spotlight effect. The story is not that anyone thinks you do not work. With a little exaggeration, they are not thinking anything about you, because they are busy with their own project. They simply need some help from you. And you are focused on “we are incredibly busy anyway, and if anyone does not see that, shame on them.” So things started to derail. Everyone was busy with their own stuff, and meanwhile a projection was born: that the other person should know exactly as much about what I am up to as I do.
And how do I come into this? And why did I say in the intro that it is worth talking about, if you did not worry much about me in the last six weeks? Because I played the whole thing out in miniature myself.
Maybe you know that I usually work in a way that every week I make a longer-format piece like this one, where I talk about some dog-related personal development topic. In the last six weeks I did not make one. I know that, and most likely nobody but me noticed. Yet the whole world could easily find out by going to my website and seeing that, yes indeed, nothing new has appeared in recent weeks.
In my worse moments it crossed my mind that surely everyone is busy with the fact that Gabi has not put out any new material in six weeks. In my inner monologue I even got as far as thinking that you must be so disappointed in me that it wipes out the value of the past nine years, and I should go hide. I had to remind myself: look, this matters, at most, to me. People are doing perfectly well with all the material they find on social media. And they read through the posts of past years when they need to. But even I, who live and breathe conscious thinking and handling cognitive biases, can fall for this.
Okay, so you understand that we have a tendency to overestimate how much others deal with us. Now comes the question: fine, but how do I unsubscribe from that? Cognitive biases have the property that they are built into how our mind works. You cannot say, thank you very much, I do not want the spotlight effect anymore, I withdraw my consent. Instead you have to learn to catch it when it happens. You can do that really well by making yourself aware of how little you actually think about others.
Just try this little exercise: think back on how many boring presentations you have sat through in your life. Probably quite a lot. And how many times you were sure the speaker did not mean to say what came out of their mouth. Maybe you even had a laugh together. Or when did you last see a typo in an email, a mistake in a report, a dog bolting out of the dog run? And you still do not lie awake at night about it. It does not weigh on you what a silly spot the person got themselves into. You simply move on.
And please, please build into the way you work that when you start to feel really terrible (pardon the strong word, I use it on purpose), when you start spinning up about oh my god, what will others think, then pull out the knowledge that you also think next to nothing about others. At least nowhere near as much as you are assuming is happening with you.
So take this away from this episode: our mind is built to overestimate how much others deal with us. That tends to create tension and bad feelings in us. You cannot fully opt out of it, but you can become aware when the process kicks in and step away from it.