It's hard to imagine a more humiliating ordeal for an Ivy Leaguer. CornellUniversity psychologist Thomas Gilovich, Ph.D., sent students into a room where other undergrads were filling out a questionnaire. But before they went in, he had the newcomers put on . . . Barry Manilow T-shirts.
After the brief encounter Gilovich asked the dubiously dressed students if they thought their classmates had noticed their attire. The subjects supposed that half their peers had been silently snickering, but in reality only 23 percent had noticed their questionable clothing.
While this experiment might seem like a professor's fashion faux pas, it demonstrates what Gilovich calls the "spotlight effect": our tendency to overestimate how often people notice not only how we look but also what we do.
"People assume the social spotlight shines on them more brightly than it really does," he says. This misunderstanding has its roots in childhood, a time when we believe the world revolves around us. Our early egocentrism never completely fades, as Gilovich confirmed in additional offbeat experiments:
