Spotlight effect

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The spotlight effect is the psychological phenomenon by which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are. As individuals are often at the center of their own world, an accurate evaluation of how much they are noticed by others is uncommon. The reason for the spotlight effect is a cognitive bias which overlooks the fact that individuals are unlikely to be at the center of everyone else's world. This tendency is especially prominent when an individual does something atypical, such as committing a faux pas. Research has empirically shown that such drastic over-estimation of one's effect on others is widely common. Many professionals in social psychology encourage people to be conscious of the spotlight effect and to allow this phenomenon to moderate the extent to which one believes one is in a social spotlight.