Go ahead and wear that Barry Manilow shirt!

My wife and I attended a wedding a few months ago.  The wedding was a three hour drive away from us, so we left on Friday evening after work.  Neither one of us packed ahead of time, so we each threw some clothes in a bag and left home in order to beat the rush hour traffic.  Unfortunately, I brought one of my dress shirts with French cuffs and forgot the cuff links.  I had to wear the shirt, so I just went without cuff links.  My wife kept telling me that no one would notice, but I wasn't so sure.  Rather than risk being caught, I simply told my sister-in-law who was sitting next to me what had happened.  She just shrugged it off.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was experiencing what cognitive psychologists call the "spotlight effect".  The "spotlight effect" is that tendency that we apparently all have to overestimate how much people notice things about us.  It's as if we had a spotlight shining on us to highlight all of our personal flaws for everyone in the world to see.  The "spotlight effect" was first described by Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Husted Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky in a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  These investigators found that college undergraduate students significantly overestimated how many of their classmates would notice that they were wearing an embarassing T-shirt to class (in this case, the T-shirt was a Barry Manilow shirt!).  It wasn't even close!  

Apparently we are so self-absorbed that we believe that we are the center of the universe.  Okay, it's probably not quite that extreme, but you get the picture.  We falsely believe that we stand out in the eyes of others, both in a positive sense ("Wow, look at the dude, he is so cool!") and negative sense ("Wow, look at the dude, he is such a nerd!").  The evidence tells us that this is simply false - unless we are wearing a clown outfit in the middle of a crowd, people aren't likely to notice anything different about us.  

So next time you are having a "bad hair day" or have a spot of coffee on your shirt, don't worry about it.  Chances are that people aren't going to notice.  As Adam Grant recently said on Twitter, "The people you are trying to impress are probably busy trying to impress someone else."  Go ahead and wear that Barry Manilow shirt - proudly!