Barry Manilow and Bob Marley are two vastly different musicians who helped prove a point in an experiment – that none of us are the center of attention that many of us think we are.
As The Atlantic reports, the experiment, done in 2000 by psychologist Thomas Gilovich, involved having undergraduate students wear a T-shirt they found to be embarrassing, that of Barry Manilow, and then hang out in a room full of other students. The Manilow T-shirt wearing students were then asked to guess how many of the other students noticed what they were wearing and their guesses drastically overestimated the number.
But the same proved to be true when the students were asked to wear a T-shirt with an artist they perceived to be a much cooler Bob Marley T-shirt, but the results were the same. The students overestimated the number of people who took notice.
Gilovich and his colleagues dubbed this the “spotlight effect,” which originates from the fact that most people are naturally conscious of themselves, and therefore, infer that everyone else around them share this focus, positive or negative.
The realization that people aren’t as hyper-focused on you as you think might be liberating in that most people either act or fail to act based on what others will think.