The spotlight effect describes how people tend to believe that others are paying more attention to them than they actually are—in other words, our tendency to always feel like we are “in the spotlight.” This bias shows up frequently in our day-to-day lives, both in positive situations (like when we nail a presentation and overestimate how impressed all our co-workers must be) and in negative ones (like when we bomb the presentation and feel like everybody must be laughing about it behind our backs).

聚光灯效应是指人们倾向于相信别人给予对他们比实际更多的关注——换句话说，我们总觉得自己“在聚光灯下”。这种偏见经常出现在我们的日常生活中，无论是在积极的情况下(比如我们在公司做了一个演示，并高估了所有同事对我们的印象)，还是在消极的情况下(比如我们搞砸了演示，觉得每个人都在背后嘲笑我们)。

Let’s say you go to a party at your friend’s house, and you end up spilling some of your drink on your shirt. As you make your way to the bathroom to clean yourself up, you feel like everybody at the party is watching you make a fool of yourself, and you’re incredibly embarrassed. However, a few weeks after the party, when you bring it up with your friends, nobody else even remembers the incident.The spotlight effect causes us to have an exaggerated view of our own significance to the people around us, leading us to misjudge situations

假设你去朋友家参加派对，结果把饮料洒在了衬衫上。当你去洗手间梳洗时，你觉得派对上的每个人都在看你出丑，你感到非常尴尬。然而，派对几周后，当你和朋友提起这件事时，甚至没有人记得这件事。
聚光灯效应使我们夸大了自己对周围人的重要性，导致我们错误地判断情况

The belief that others are always paying close attention to us can be harmful to our mental health, and it can hold us back by making us feel self-conscious. If we continuously fall into the trap of the spotlight effect, we might pass up opportunities based on a mistaken assumption that others will analyze and judge us for them. The spotlight effect can also contribute to social anxiety, which has many detrimental effects on a person’s physical and mental health..

认为别人总是密切关注我们的想法有害心理健康，它会让我们感到难为情，从而阻碍我们前进。如果我们不断陷入聚光灯效应的陷阱，我们可能会基于一个错误的假设而错过机会，即别人会据此分析和评判我们。聚光灯效应还会导致社交焦虑，这对一个人的身心健康有很多不利影响。
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In part, the spotlight effect is driven by another cognitive bias, known as anchoring (or the anchoring bias). First coined by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two of the “founding fathers” of behavioral economics, anchoring describes how when we are making decisions, we tend to rely too heavily on information that we received early on in the process.3 Once we make a plan or estimate based on this early information, we start to think about everything that happens next in terms of that initial value. This makes us resistant to making major changes to our plan, even if the situation calls for it.

在某种程度上，聚光灯效应是由一种认知偏差驱动的，即锚定(或锚定偏差)。“锚定”这个词最初是由行为经济学的两位“奠基人”阿莫斯·特沃斯基和丹尼尔·卡尼曼提出的，它描述了我们在做决策时，往往过于依赖在决策过程早期获得的信息。一旦我们根据这些早期的信息制定了一个计划或预案，我们将以此为基础考虑接下来发生的每件事。这也使我们需要对计划做出重大改变时产生抵触心理。

The effects of anchoring are so strong that we can even become anchored to information that’s not relevant to our goals. For example, in one experiment, people were asked to provide the last two digits of their social security number. They were then shown a number of products one at a time, including obxts like computer equipment, bottles of wine, books, and boxes of chocolate. For each item, participants were asked if they would be willing to pay the amount that their two social security digits formed. For example, if somebody’s number ended in 34, they would say whether or not they would pay $34 for each item. After that, the researchers asked what the maximum amount was that the participants would be willing to pay.

锚定的影响是如此强烈，以至于我们甚至会被锚定在与我们目标无关的信息上。例如，在一项实验中，人们被要求提供他们社保号的后两位数字。然后向他们展示一些产品，包括电脑设备、葡萄酒、书籍和巧克力盒等物品。对于每个项目，参与者都被问及是否愿意支付他们两个社保数字构成的金额。
例如，如果某人的社保数字以34结尾，他们会问实验参与者是否愿意支付34美元。然后研究员会问实验参与者愿意支付的最高金额是多少。

This study found that, even though the social security number is just a random string of numerals, people still became “anchored” to the amount these digits formed. Those who had higher numbers were willing to pay much more for the same products, compared to others who happened to have lower numbers.4 As this experiment shows, any information we receive at the start of our decision making process becomes our point of reference for future decisions, even if this is illogical or puts us at a disadvantage.

这项研究发现，即使社会保险号码只是一串随机数字，人们仍然会被这些数字所组成的数量“锚定”。与数字号低的人相比，数字号高的人愿意为同样的产品支付更多的钱。
正如这个实验所显示的那样，我们在做决定前收集到的任何信息，都将会成为我们未来做决定时的参考点，即使这是不合逻辑的或让我们处于不利地位的信息。

So, what does this have to do with the spotlight effect? When we are making judgments about social situations, we become anchored to our own perceptions, because they are the only thing we have immediate access to.

那么，这和聚光灯效应有什么关系呢?当我们对社会环境做出判断时，我们会依赖于自己的感知，因为它们是我们唯一能直接接触到的东西。

There is some experimental evidence to back up this theory. In the first paper on the spotlight effect, published by Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Husted Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky researchers elicited the spotlight effect in their participants by putting them in a situation that most college students at the time (that is to say, the late 1990s) would find embarrassing: being forced to wear a T-shirt featuring everyone’s favorite one-hit wonder, Vanilla Ice, singer of “Ice Ice Baby.” (An earlier version of the experiment involved T-shirts with the face of singer Barry Manilow.) The participants were then briefly brought into a room where a few other students were working, after which they answered some questions from the researchers.Gilovich, Husted Medvec, and Savitsky had already shown (through the Barry Manilow shirt study and others) that participants significantly overestimated how many of the other students would be able to recall what was pictured on their shirt. This is the spotlight effect at work: the T-shirt wearers, feeling embarrassed about their outfit, felt that people were paying more attention to them than they really were.

有一些实验证据支持这一理论。在第一篇由Thomas Gilovich、Victoria Husted Medvec和Kenneth Savitsky发表的关于聚光灯效应的论文中，研究人员将参与者置于一个当时大多数大学生都会感到尴尬的环境中，从而引出他们的聚光灯效应:比如被迫穿一件t恤，上面印着大众喜欢的歌手的头像。然后，参与者被短暂地带到一个房间，那里有其他一些学生正在学习，然后他们回答了研究人员的一些问题。
实验结果表明，参与者明显高估了其他学生对自己的关注，很少有人能够回忆起他们衬衫上的图片。这就是工作中的聚光灯效应:穿t恤的人对自己的着装感到尴尬，觉得人们对他们的关注比实际的更多。

Another reason that the spotlight effect might happen is that we are more familiar with our own behavior and appearance than other people are, and so we are more aware when there is something “off” about it. Everyone has had “bad hair days,” for instance, or mornings where they’ve woken up to find an angry, red pimple on their face. Or, to give a non-beauty-related example, academics who give the same talk over and over again might feel like they do a great job on some days and a terrible job on others, and be surprised to find that they get a similar response from their audience regardless.

可能发生聚光灯效应的另一个原因是，我们比其他人更熟悉自己的行为和外表，所以当有什么“不正常”的地方时，我们会更清楚。例如，每个人都有过“头发不好的日子”，或者早上醒来发现脸上有一个令人生气的红痘痘。或者，举一个与美貌无关的例子，一遍又一遍地做同样演讲的学者可能会觉得他们有时讲得很好，有时讲得很糟，然后他们惊奇地发现，无论如何，他们从听众那里得到的反应都差不多。

When we do something out-of-the-ordinary or perceive a change in our own appearance, it feels like everybody else must be just as fixated on it as we are—but they’re not. Research has confirmed that we tend to overestimate how much other people notice variations in the way we act or look.

当我们做了一些不寻常的事情，或察觉到自己的外表发生了变化时，会觉得其他人肯定和我们一样对它印象深刻——但并不是。研究证实，我们往往会高估别人对我们行为或外表变化的注意程度。

As mentioned above, the spotlight effect can contribute to social anxiety, which has consequences for our social lives as well as our overall health. It can also cause us to make decisions based on the incorrect assumption that we are being constantly sized up by other people. The reality, for better or worse, is that people often don’t notice or care about things we are highly conscious of ourselves. Thinking otherwise can cost us opportunities and negatively affect our relationships with other people. However, once we’re aware of this bias, we can take steps to overcome it.

如上所述，聚光灯效应会导致社交焦虑，这对我们的社交生活和整体健康都有影响。它也会导致我们基于错误的假设做出决定，我们总是被别人衡量。现实情况是，无论好坏，人们往往不会注意或关心我们为之纠结焦虑的事情。聚光灯效应会让我们失去机会，并对我们与他人的关系产生负面影响。然而，一旦我们意识到这种认知偏差，我们就可以采取措施克服它。
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Everybody is susceptible to the spotlight effect. However, people who belong to a minority group might also feel “in the spotlight” when topics related to their group come up in conversation.
In a study on this “minority spotlight effect,” participants (some white, some belonging to an ethnic minority) were brought into a room where two other people were waiting. These people were confederates, meaning that they were “in on” the experiment and were working with the experimenter. All three put on headphones and listened to a recording. Participants heard about either carbon emissions (the control condition) or affirmative action, an issue that is related to race. Meanwhile, the confederates heard instructions that told them where to look, and when. Sometimes they were told to simply look up, while other times they were told to look at the participant.

每个人都容易受到聚光灯效应的影响。然而，当与他们群体相关的话题在谈话中出现时，属于少数群体的人可能也会感到“在聚光灯下”。
在一项关于“少数人聚光灯效应”的研究中，参与者(一些是白人，一些属于少数族裔)被带到一个房间，另外两个人在那里等着。这两个人是提前准备好的演员。三个人都戴上了耳机，听着录音。参与者听到的内容要么是碳排放，要么是与种族有关的平权行动。与此同时，演员听到了指示，告诉他们何时看向什么地方。有时他们被告知只是向上看，而其他时候他们被告知要盯着参与者。
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The results showed that minority participants who listened to the affirmative action tape felt like the confederates had stared at them significantly more than the other groups, even though they had actually looked at everybody for the exact same amount of time. This group also said they felt more “in the spotlight,” and experienced more negative emotions than others. This might happen because people of color are used to being put on the spot when the topic of race comes up, leading them to feel uncomfortable in anticipation of this happening again.7

结果显示，听平权录音的少数族裔，感觉演员盯着他们看的时间明显多于其他组，尽管实际上演员盯着每个参与者的时间是完全相同的。这组少数族裔参与者还表示，他们感觉自己处于“聚光灯下”，比其他人产生了更多的负面情绪。这可能是因为有色人种经历了在种族话题出现时的尴尬处境，这导致他们对这种情况再次发生感到不舒服

If you’re feeling “in the spotlight,” try reminding yourself that most people simply aren’t as focused on your behavior as you are. You can also imagine how you’d feel if the roles were reversed. If the spotlight effect is driving more severe or pervasive anxiety, it might be worth trying some exercises from cognitive behavioral therapy

如果你感觉自己产生了“聚光灯效应”，试着提醒自己，大多数人根本不像你想的那样关注你的行为。你也可以尝试如果角色互换，你会有什么感觉。如果聚光灯效应导致了更严重或更普遍的焦虑，也许你需要尝试一些认知行为疗法

原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处