Kenneth Savitsky

The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment: An Egocentric Bias in Estimates of the Salience of One's Own Actions and Appearance

This research provides evidence that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted by others, a phenomenon dubbed the spotlight effect. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who were asked to don a T-shirt depicting either a flattering or potentially embarrassing image overestimated the number of observers who would be able to recall what was pictured on the shirt. In Study 3, participants in a group discussion overestimated how prominent their positive and negative utterances were to their fellow discussants. Studies 4 and 5 provide evidence supporting an anchoring-and-adjustment interpretation of the spotlight effect. In particular, people appear to anchor on their own rich phenomenological experience and then adjust--insufficiently--to take into account the perspective of others. The discussion focuses on the manifestations and implications of the spotlight effect across a host of everyday social phenomena.

Behavioral Confirmation in the Interrogation Room: On the Dangers of Presuming Guilt

A two-phased experiment tested the hypothesis that the presumption of guilt that underlies police interrogations activates a process of behavioral confirmation. In Phase I, 52 suspects guilty or innocent of a mock theft were questioned by 52 interrogators led to believe that most suspects were guilty or innocent. Interrogators armed with guilty as opposed to innocent expectations selected more guilt-presumptive questions, used more interrogation techniques, judged the suspect to be guilty, and exerted more pressure to get a confession—particularly when paired with innocent suspects. In Phase II, neutral observers listened to audiotapes of the suspect, interrogator, or both. They perceived suspects in the guilty expectations condition as more defensive—and as somewhat more guilty. Results indicate that a presumption of guilt sets in motion a process of behavioral confirmation by which expectations influence the interrogators behavior, the suspects behavior, and ultimately the judgments of neutral observers.

The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety

Abstract Individuals often believe their internal states are more apparent to others than is actually the case, a phenomenon known as the illusion of transparency. In the domain of public speaking, for example, individuals who are nervous about delivering a public speech believe their nervousness is more apparent to their audience than it actually is, a finding we document in Study 1. We contend that the illusion of transparency can play a role in the self-exacerbating nature of speech anxiety, and show in Study 2 that an awareness of the illusion can improve the quality of a speaker’s performance, from both the speaker’s own perspective and in the eyes of observers. Discussion focuses on the application of these findings to the treatment of speech anxiety and other forms of social anxiety.

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 to overestimate 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.

Knowing Too Much Using Private Knowledge to Predict How One Is Viewed by Others

People have more information about themselves than others do, and this fundamental asymmetry can help to explain why individuals have difficulty accurately intuiting how they appear to other people. Determining how one appears to observers requires one to utilize public information that is available to observers, but to disregard private information that they do not possess. We report a series of experiments, however, showing that people utilize privately known information about their own past performance (Experiments 1 and 2), the performance of other people (Experiment 3), and imaginary performance (Experiment 4) when intuiting how they are viewed by others. This tendency can help explain why peoples beliefs about how they are judged by others often diverge from how they are actually judged.

Heuristics and Biases: Like Goes with Like: The Role of Representativeness in Erroneous and Pseudo-Scientific Beliefs

As its name implies, the heuristics and biases approach to human judgment has both positive and negative agendas (Griffin, Gonzalez, & Varey, 2001). The positive agenda is to identify the mental operations that yield rapid and compelling solutions to a host of everyday judgmental problems. Most notably, Kahneman and Tversky identified a small number of automatic assessments – similarity, generation of examples, causal judgments – that are made rapidly in response to particular problems and thus exert considerable influence on the judgments that are ultimately rendered (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). When ascertaining the likelihood that someone is an engineer, for example, one cannot help but assess the similarity between the person in question and the prototypical engineer, and the resultant assessment is, at the very least, the starting point for the judgment of likelihood. Thus, the positive agenda is to understand what the processes of judgment are like. The negative agenda is to understand what the processes of judgment are not like. Because assessments of similarity, the generation of examples, and causal judgments obey their own logic, everyday judgment will not always be fully “rational” and will not always conform to the laws of probability. Thus, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that peoples judgments are insufficiently sensitive to sample size, regression effects, prior odds, or, more generally, the reliability and diagnosticity of evidence. Their experiments were carefully crafted to reveal discrepancies between intuitive judgment and what is called for by the appropriate normative analysis.

When Social Worlds Collide: Overconfidence in the Multiple Audience Problem

Individuals sometimes try to convey different identities to different people simultaneously or to convey certain information to one individual while simultaneously concealing it from another. How successfully can people solve these multiple audience problems and how successfully do they think they can? The research presented here corroborates previous findings that people are rather adept at such tasks. In Study 1, participants who adopted different identities in preliminary interactions with two other participants (acting the part of a studious nerd with one and a fun-loving party animal with the other) were able to preserve these identities when they interacted subsequently with both individuals at the same time. In Study 2, participants were able to communicate a secret word to one audience while simultaneously concealing it from another. Despite their skill at these tasks, however, participants in both studies were overconfident in their abilities, believing that they were better able to solve these multiple audience problems than they actually were.

On the Genesis of Inflated (and Deflated) Judgments of Responsibility: Egocentrism Revisited

Prior research has found that people tend to overestimate their relative contributions to joint tasks (e.g., Ross & Sicoly, 1979). In the present research we investigate one of the causes of this bias, and in doing so, identify an important moderator of the effect. In three studies we demonstrate that when people estimate their relative contributions to collective endeavors they focus on their own contributions and give less consideration to the contributions of their collaborators. This can cause overestimation of relative contributions when absolute contributions are numerous, but underestimation of relative contributions when absolute contributions are few. These results extend Ross & Sicolys (1979) original egocentrism analysis of bias in responsibility attributions, but also suggest that the tendency to overestimate ones relative contributions to collaborations is not as ubiquitous as once thought.

Is our absence as conspicuous as we think? Overestimating the salience and impact of one’s absence from a group

Abstract This research provides evidence that people overestimate the salience to others of their own absence from a group. Although individuals regard the removal of someone else from a group to be less salient than the addition of that person, they regard their own removal as every bit as salient as their addition (Study 1). Those absent from a group also expect their absence to be salient in the eyes of others, overestimating the extent to which their absence will be noticed by others (Study 2), and rating their absence as having had a larger impact on the group’s subsequent functioning than others do (Study 3). Discussion focuses on individuals’ assessments of their absence as an example of a broader egocentrism in social judgment.

The Minority Spotlight Effect

Across three studies, members of underrepresented groups felt that they were the center of others’ attention when topics related to their group were discussed, and this experience was accompanied by negative emotions. Black participants reported that they would feel most “in the spotlight” when they were the only Black individual in a class in which the professor drew attention to their group with a provocative comment (Study 1). Black and Latino/Latina (Study 2) and female (Study 3) participants likewise reported that two confederates looked at them more when they heard (and believed the confederates had also heard) a recording that pertained to their group than when they heard a recording on a neutral topic—despite the fact that the confederates’ gaze did not differ across conditions. We discuss these results in light of research on solo status and targeted social referencing.