From the Vault: The Spotlight Effect

recording this intro is still an ongoing, uh journey. But but yeah, that was definitely on our minds back then, and and this episode came out of it. But I ended up thinking this was a really interesting subject. Yeah, it definitely goes beyond the zoom realm. So if you were by the time you listen to this, if you were outside of the zoom realm. If if this seems like an artifact of the past, uh, you know, don't worry. The spotlight effect is very much in play in the

world that you're living in. Hello. Everyone, This is Seth, the audio producer for Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And there's just a quick note before we start. Myself, Robert and Joe, we are still recording in isolation because it is the summer of and well, this episode, we had a bit of a problem with Robert's microphone. It was a one time thing. It shouldn't happen again in the future. But for this episode, it's gonna sound a little bit like Joe is kind of talking to a tv VCR

combo and like a bunker somewhere. But well, I guess that's technically kind of what we're actually doing. But anyway, anyway, point is this is a one time incident. Uh, it's all still very understandable, very easy to listen to in this episode of Cleaned it Up as best I can, And next time it'll sound just like normal, we promise. Thanks, enjoy the show. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm

Joe McCormick. In today we're gonna be talking about mostly focusing on a classic psychology paper about an effect in uh in a kind of social cognitive bias known as

the spotlight effect. But to get into this subject, I wanted to start off by thinking about something that a lot of people have found themselves doing in the past few months of people who maybe this wasn't part of your job very much recently, but now you spend a significant portion of your day in web video meetings, staring at little boxes of your co workers faces on a computer screen, or maybe just staring at your own face a lot. Yes, uh, I mean, in fact, right now

is Joe and I are recording this. We are using a Zoom call. We are using a Zoom conference room to communicate with each other, and then we're using some other programs and what not to to actually record it. But yeah, a lot of people are having to You may be using something different. You might be using what there's like Google meet, Microsoft meeting, like Facebook flop. I mean they're like a million of them, right, I mean this is an optagram. Yeah, it's a growth industry figuring

out and it makes sense, right. We need to still be able to connect with each other, We still need to have meaningful meetings and all of those less meaningful meetings and in order to keep the gears of business

grinding away. Right. Yeah. And one of the strange things I've noticed, and I've read other people noticing the exact same thing, is that you might expect that being able to do a meeting from your home over the internet would be maybe less exhausting than a meeting in person, but somehow I have not found it to be the case. I found that like, video chats can be just intensely draining, like after they're over, you feel like you've been lifting

weights or something. Uh. And part of what's going on here I found very much embodied in the spirit of an article that I saw link to. It's it's just a medium post, and I want to be very clear that I'm not passing judgment on the author here, that nothing wrong with with this person, but the title of it just gave me chills. And the title of this medium post was how to fake eye contact during video chats and why it's important. Yes, this this was this

is interesting. This is what a medium article by Alexa Curtis, and they made three key suggestions here. The first one is to use a webcam even if no one else is okay. The second is trick yourself into looking at the camera instead of at the screen impossible, and then tape your prompts, your notes, whatever to your monitor as much as possible instead of having to refer to like

a notepad or something. Yeah, the suggest sin is like make a little fake face to go around the webcam box so that we're looking into the camera instead of at the screen. But I just don't think it's like if your face is played back on the screen, unless you are able to turn your face off for yourself, you just you're not going to be able to help it, are you. Yeah. I actually, before I read this, I

kind of thought because I'd catch myself doing this. Um, And now now I should say that I am lucky and that I do not have to set through just hours and hours of meetings today and zoom. I have friends who are definitely stuck in that boat, and they seem exhausted by it. We use zoom in these recordings, but for the most part, we're not actually engaging in the video part of it. We we have other stuff, We have notes, stuff that we're looking at when we're recording.

But I have found this to be the case with my My Dungeons and Dragons group, which used to meet in person, but now it's forced to meet via zoom, and we have this, you know, and it's like a two or three hour zoom called you know, like a three hour zoom called it would be once a week,

you know, to do Dungeon and Dragons. And for some reason, I've been noticing that I've just I felt kind of worn out by it towards the end of of the night, um in ways that I wasn't worn out previously meeting in person, Like I just kind of felt zapped by it, like if we were battling something. At the end, I'm just kind of going through the motions. I'm just not feeling it anymore at that point. Yeah, the exact same experience.

I've done social stuff via video calls. I've also been doing a D and D campaign, my my first ever by the way, Thank you over over Zoom, and it's been a lot of fun. But yes, it is. It is kind of exhausting to just participate in the in the eyeball Tennis of of the different video faces on the screen. Something about it hooks its claws into your brain and just pulls and stretches and kind of needs

your brain like a ball of dough. Now four only, I don't know how your campaign is going, but with ours, were also using a couple other resources, were Reason to Discord Forum and we're using role twenty to pull up maps and such. So maybe maybe we should upgrade our technology. It's worth looking into. But but basically we have some other things to captivate our eyes during this this process.

I guess one of the things about a straight up like business zoom meeting is a lot of times you're just stuck in those Brady bunch um cubes, right, You're just you're just stuck with all these little screen pictures of people and uh and some Sometimes you have it set to where one will take dominance over the others, but you may just be looking at a wall of people's faces. And then you're thinking about again this point

of should I be making eye contact with everybody? Should I be focusing on trying to be the most presentable, you know, the most professional looking, Like when they look at my little box, it's like watching a TV broadcast and I'm making direct eye contact with them, maybe by because i have a little sticky smiley face that I've put up at the top of my computer, by the camera. There are multiple ways in which this type of interaction is not normal. I mean, of course, it's not normal

to be interfacing through technology at all. Of course, it's kind of strange that you're not looking at the person, but you're looking at the screen, so the eye contact is off. I understand that that point in the article. But at the same time, it is not normal to be able to see yourself while you're talking to people. I can imagine if you know you were always talking to people with a mirror in your hand that was reflecting your face. Yeah, people would rightfully think you were insane,

think that was how like self obsessed you are. But you go or I don't know, or afraid of Gorgon's that you always had to have a mirror in your hand. And yet that's the reality we find ourselves. And I know this is this is not just like our particular reaction to this. This is something that that I've read about in multiple popular articles and also not just an

obscure scientific articles. Like there was an article I came across and I think it was Business Insider that was called like why you can't stop up steering at yourself in zoom calls? Yes, this was by Shia Fetter titled a cyber psychologist explains why you can't stop steering yourself

on zoom calls? And everyone else is probably doing the same, um, which I I have caught myself doing this, sometimes during donuts and dragons, sometimes during work calls, where you know you want to check in, you want to see how you were presenting to the rest of the world. But then it's often easy to sort of, you know, to to to. You're looking at these wall of faces, and then you decide to maximize your own, and you're like, all right, let's see, how's the light hitting me, what's

my hair doing right now? How presented my smiling weird? My smiling weird? Do I look do I look engage? Or do I look as bored as I feel? You know? Um? And so that's what this article gets into a little of that year. So m the article discusses some key points made by cyber psychologist Andrew Franklin. So the first one is that in general, adolescents tend to suffer from the imagine very audience delusion, the idea that people in the surroundings are really paying attention to every move they make,

and this often follows us into adulthood as well. Yeah, and this I think is pretty close to or perhaps even just another name for the main issue we're going to be focusing on today and otherwise known as the spotlight effect. Yes, now, one thing about this, this point about adolescents. Uh, I mean, this is of course terrifying to think about, given the nature of social media, which is pretty much predicated on this sort of celebrity aspiring

notion of a constant audience. And uh and and one tends to drift to extremes and reaction to that, right, this feeling that every word I put on the Internet, or every video, every whatever is vitally important. It will be viewed by potentially everyone in the world. Yes, You're not just constantly on view, you are constantly being reviewed,

is the perception. Yeah, I know obviously that's it's gonna vary from person person, or some people are gonna use social media in a way that hasn't far more limited scope only close friends or maybe even family, maybe just one person can see you know. But but but yeah, it does make me wonder and this would have to be a you know, a discussion for another time, like just what what what is happening when this spotlight effect, this imaginary audience delusion is playing uh into our use

of social media. Yeah, but also so this psychology professor Andrew Franklin also makes the point that, like, it's not just an illusion that like video chats are actually exhausting. Yeah, yeah, to make the point of video chats are more stressful than in person meetings, and a big part of that is just everything is more distracted, more fragmented, and we have muted or severely lessened nonverbal communicative skills. So you think of a lot of this is kind of an

overstatement of the obvious. But you can do far less with your body language, not only your overt bodyline, which like talking with your hands and waving down people to the other side of the table, but in terms of just having a bodily awareness of what everyone is doing and how they are sort of reacting to what's going on, and if someone else is about to speak or needs

to speak. Yes, And it's actually hard to tell who's looking at who, Like you can assume if there are a bunch of Brady bunch boxes that people are probably looking if they're not looking at themselves, they're probably looking at the person who's currently talking, but maybe not. You

can't tell. Yeah, And and it's also weird to think, like I guess maybe some of you out there had more of like a you know, rules of order kind of a upbringing or or you know, you have some more training and think, Okay, this is how this is how a business meeting goes, this is how a work meeting operates. But I feel for my part, a lot of it's just kind of you just learn it to go, just sort of figure out what is the culture of this group and this meeting, and and how am I

supposed to fit in? And then to a certain extent, it feels like we've had to relearn all of that or augment our understand ending of that based on the limitations of the technology. Yeah, I think that's totally right, and and I would I would emphasize yet again that not all digital socialization skills are are interchangeable or transferable

to one another. So you might have been well acclimatized to the social skills one needs in order to interact through a different type of mediated social media like like Facebook or Twitter or something like that, and still not really have any skills for how to interact via a video chat. It's just like a different set of skills, a different set of things to get used to. Yeah,

it's a different talking stick entirely now now. Franklin also drives something that given the strain of keeping up with everyone's tiny boxes and concern over how you yourself look in your box, you might easily find yourself just looking at yourself, staring into the digital mirror and fixating on how you appear to friends, co workers, and bosses and and Franklin maintains that this means you're likely overwhelmed by proceedings,

which which I totally get. Again, even with the low stakes confines of a Dungeons and Dragons, you know, nothing huge is on the line here, But by the end of the of the session again, I often find myself kind of zapped in ways that I never felt before within person gaming. And even though we're staring into that digital reflection of our own face, Franklin stresses that people are ultimately not fixating on you like you think they are.

They are not setting there watching you and you know, dissecting everything about your appearance and in your background and what your face is doing it in any given set. Yeah. No, They're probably much more likely fixating on themselves the same way you are fixating on yourself. Uh. And so this brings us back to the cognitive bias that we're gonna be focusing on in today's episode, also known as the

spotlight effect. And this effect is very interesting because, on one hand, I think it's one of the simplest psychological phenomena we've ever talked about on the show. It's actually very simple to or it's very straightforward in a way. But it's one of those things where if you really

internalize it, it's implications could be kind of life changing. Yeah, it's one of these things that doesn't I wouldn't say that it really like changes the nature of your reality, but it brings certain aspects of it into maybe sharper focus. You might realize, Oh, well, okay, that explains some of the things I feel when I am in a meeting or you know, just walking around. Um uh, you know, in a public space or or whatever the case may be. Um, I do feel like it does it does It does

feel like a revelation of it in its own way. Yeah. So the main paper that I wanted to focus on today was published in the year two thousand in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Thomas Gilovich, Victoria who Staid Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky, and it's called the spotlight effect in social judgment, an ecocentric bias, and estimates of the salience of one zone actions and appearance. You can pretty easily find a full PDF of this online if you want to read it. And this is a

highly cited paper. It has been referred to many many times in the years since as a kind of seminal work on this on this social cognitive bias. So the authors begin with some anecdotal observations, and these observations are that for both good and ill, it often seems like stuff you expect other people to notice and recall about you really goes unnoticed. Uh. And also on the good side, that might be like something smart that you said in

a discussion group. You're like really pleased with yourself that like, oh, I had that really good insight or I made that really funny joke, and then it turns out later that nobody else seems to recall that you said anything. Or perhaps this often actually happens in athletic contexts, where people will make a really good odd in a basketball game or something, and they will expect people to remember that they did that. But then maybe it turns out that

nobody really noticed. It just kind of was one of the goals in a game in which many goals were scored.

And as frustrating as this can be, it can also kind of be a relief that it works the other way to People often don't seem to have noticed when you make what feels like a really obvious mistake faux paw on a first meeting, or when you misspeak and what feels like an embarrassing way, or that time you had spinach in your teeth, like you obsess over that and you're afraid it's going to completely ruin your reputation, that everybody's gonna remember you for that thing forever. But

a lot of times it seems like maybe nobody even noticed. Yeah, the dual nature of this particular revelation, I think ultimately it is positive because, yeah, maybe it means you're not as important as you thought you were. Maybe you're not as a it's a it's explosive the personality as you thought you were. But on the other hand, uh, you know, maybe the steaks a little bit lower every time you

open your mouth. Yeah, Yeah, that's the hypothesis at the heart of this paper that these anecdotal observations are indicative of a real trend that can be measured that, in general, humans have an ecocentric bias that causes us to believe that our actions and our appearance are much more salient and notable to other people than they really are. Quote. People tend to believe that more people take a note of their actions and appearance than is actually the case.

We dubbed this putative phenomenon the spotlight effect. People tend to believe that the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it really does. Yeah, this is insightful, and I think we can all match this up pretty easily, first of all with our own experiences, but also with some of the ideas that we've discussed on the show before. Uh specifically, First of all, there's the self narrative aspect

of our inner thoughts. You know, through the inner workings of consciousness, were constantly weaving together a story about who we are and how we fit into the world. It's a little movie, and we're the main character, so of course we're the most important person in that story. Right.

You're trying to link together a series of what are in fact sort of random events into a cohesive narrative with a logic to it, right, And then through theory of mind, we're constantly running simulations about the mental states of other people, specific people, people in general, known people, unknown people, sort of hypothetical people. Uh. And and of course one of the key aspects of any of these simulations is, you know, how do they relate to me,

how do they think about me? What are their intentions towards me? And that makes sense, right, There's an inherently self centered quality to this sort of thinking because it all comes down to individual survival. We tend to air on the side of seeing tigers in the grass when there are none, which is better of the two possible gambles here, But it also means going through life perpetually

imagining how the tiger sees you. Yeah, and so this is in some ways the exact social equivalent of the agency detection overdrive, where you, you know, over interpret a crack of a twig as a tiger in the grass. Here, you over interpret any little thing that that you think maybe going wrong in a social interaction as something that people will notice and remember and judge you for. So maybe we should take a quick break and then when we come back, we can get a little bit further

into this study. Thank you, thank you, thank Alright, we're back. Okay. So we're talking about the study from the year two thousand by Gilovich and co authors who are putting forth this this putative phenomenon that at the time they called the spotlight effects, the idea that we overestimate the salience of our appearance and our behavior to other people. And the authors here note several lines of previous research that

helped point to this conclusion. One of them is, first of all, this may not be surprising at all, but people do tend to have egocentric biases that you can measure quite easily and in in tests. These are biases

that overstate the importance of the self. Just one example the site is a paper by Ross and Sickly published in nineteen seventy nine called ego centric Biases and Availability and Attribution, and it showed it showed this in the realm of what's called responsibility allocation, Who did, how much and how important was what they did? So there are several different ways you can test for this. Uh, maybe

in discussion groups, maybe in household chores, maybe in basketball teams. Uh, quote one zone, contributions to a joint product are more readily available. That is, more frequently and easily recalled. Individuals accepted more responsibility for a group product than other participants attributed to them. So the easy way of thinking about this is, oh, our team one, because I scored that goal. Yeah,

I kind of this particularly telling. The authors point out that the research indicates that when individuals undertake complex social interactions, they alternate between the roles of speaker or actor and listener or observer, but much of their attention is ultimately going to be directed in many cases at planning and executing their own responses. And I think we can relate to this. Uh, you know when when those times when you haven't quite zoned out on a meeting, like you're

not just or or a conversation. You're not just you know, out here thinking about Star Wars in the back of your head. No, you're focusing instead on the thing that you're getting ready to say, your interjection into the conversation, the joke that you are intending to make when you get the talking stick. Um. And uh, you know, because ultimately that's often a part of any kind of like three way or or or larger conversation is when when

is it going to be my turn? And how am I going to make the most out of my my time speaking. I believe there's actually a name for this

exact effect. It's a different thing spend stuff. I mean, obviously it's very related to the stuff we're talking about, but I think it's called the next in line effect, where you can measure that people have less recall of if you if you like, sit people in a circle and go around the circle asking them to speak, people have less recall of the person who spoke right before them than they do everybody else, because you know, when the person right before you was talking, you're planning what

you're gonna say. Yeah, And it means that when one thinks back on a meeting, so you're in this meeting, you have this period of time where you're you're applying most of your cognitive efforts towards preparing for your own words, and then when you think back on it, you're more likely to remember the thing that you were focused on at the time. You know, your own words, your own contribution um, because that's where that's where you're spending the

mental resources. The exception to this however, would be if one's could contribution required a little effort, like instead of plotting to interject something that will make everyone laugh or pursuing some specific strategic aim in the meeting, what if it was just the part of the meeting where every week your boss says, hey, Roy, what are the numbers? Just read us the numbers real quick, and then you read the numbers something that's you know, quick and normal

like that. Now, the exception of this they mentioned would be passive observers, people who are in the meeting but are not planning to have the talking stick at any point, don't have any kind of active role in the meeting, or if they do, maybe it is just reading off the stats and they don't have a larger role to play, so they might well focus more on other people in the meeting. They are, they are going to be the ones that are going to be more likely to notice

what you say or do that. That totally makes sense to me, Um, I think I have much better recall of meetings where I am not expected to speak. That being said, and this is this is me, not the authors here, But I suspect that the passive observers are also far more likely to be thinking about Star Wars or what they're they need to buy at the grocery

score later that so supernatural biker movies. Yeah, or here's a big one and we didn't even get into this, but via the zoom call, uh one has a tremendous ability to just simply go to other websites during the call and still look basically attentive, right, because you'd just

be looking at the screen either way. Yeah, there's your excuse, folks, digital hookie, because anybody tried just putting up like a face like I know, you can insertain backgrounds on these video calls, putting up a background that has a photo of them in it so it looks like they're sitting there. I bet somebody has somebody out there has gotten a little bit forward and figured out a way to make

it happen. It would be It would be kind of the equivalent of but didn't Helmer Simpson have some glasses at one point that made him look like he was awake? Yes, it's when he's in he's on a jury and he's expected to be paying attention, but he is sleeping. That's right, that's right, I remember that wide awake glasses and one of the other jurors and arcs on him. But yeah, so so anyway, the effect here, I think pretty straightforward.

If an action stands out in your own mind for whatever reason, you're going to end up thinking it was more important in some objective sense than it actually was. And so, in other words, if people overestimate the relevance of their own actions in an objective sense, wouldn't they also overestimate how relevant their actions are subjectively to other people? Yeah? Yeah. The authors also point out in many cases it might not matter it maybe quote overlook when joint endeavors do

not require explicit allocations of responsibility. But obviously sometimes this is not the case. Yeah. It particularly makes me think of a frequent folk you see in films, the villainous meetings, when you have villains around a table generally having a meeting, having this sort of you know, dark, more antagonistic version

of our regular real life business meetings. Um, the meetings of Specter in the early James Bond Yeah, who are Blowfeld would have the have the command consoled like electrocute somebody's chair, yeah, or another favorite of mine, or the meetings you see the Imperial meetings in like Star Wars and New Hope, or we're also in Rogue one where we have the likes of Darth Vader and grand Moth

Tarken or or Orson Critic. You know, they're they're they're all objectively, they're they're all talking about, okay, we need to get the Death Star up and running. But these are all highly egotistical and self focused individuals, and they all seen each pretty focused on their own key role in everything, and they're certainly not about like elevating the project itself above personal ambition. Yeah. Yeah, they're clearly like

trying to stick up for their own branch. It's like, you know, dangerous to your star fleet commander, not to my battle station. Yeah, okay. A few more previously observed. A psychological phenomenon that the authors call attention to is is potentially backing up the idea of a spotlight effect.

Another one is what's known as naive realism. The right quote naive realism or for is to the common tendency to assume that one's perception of an object or event is an accurate reflection of its objective properties, not a subjective interpretation or construle. In other words, Look, it happened just like I saw it. It's the tendency to believe that your perception is unbiased and accurate, even though you might readily attribute, you know, mistakes and biases to other

people's perceptions. Yeah, and this is all tied up in the philosophy of perception. Um. So when we're talking about naive realism also known as direct realism, that stands in opposition do indirect or representational realism. So direct or niaive realism holds that we perceive things in the world directly and without the then the mediation of any impression, idea, or representation. And I think we can generally agree, especially on this show, that this is not the true nature

of how a human process is reality. No, the things you see are based on the external world, but it's not an unbiased direct representation of the external world. Right, Like, there's there's a weight to things, you know. It's like if you know, if yesterday somebody slapped me with the fish, today I see a fish and like that that the nature of my perception is going to be augmented by

that previous experience. Right now. Indirect realism adheres to the idea that material objects do have mind independent existence, but but not that our visual perception is unmediated, or that these objects necessarily possess all of the features that we perceived them to have. Like a quick example of that would be, obviously, we look at our beloved pets, and we may, you know, we may perceive them to have various nuances that they simply do not have. And you know,

as pet owners, were generally okay with that. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think indirect realism, I don't know, to me, that is the model of the world that makes the most sense. Like I would not say I'm an idealist. I believe the external world doesn't exist. I don't go for at But obviously our our ideas about what is motivating our dog or something might be

more us than actually coming from the dog. Yeah. Now, of course, there's also phenomenalism, which generally rejects the mind independent existence of material logics but accepts on mediated visual

perception and the possession of of perceived features. So other things are not things as much as they are bundles of sense data, which is a weird way to to behold your pat after Yeah, that's getting almost into kind of George Berkeley and kind of territory that that I don't think I can fully go for, but that it

ultimately doesn't really play into what we're talking about here. Again, we're talking about direct realism or our naive realism versus indirect or representational realism, right, And I think we do have a tendency to really underappreciate how much our perceptions are affected by the kinds of mistakes and distortions that we readily attribute to other people. And so the authors of the two thousand paper right that quote applied to

the spotlight effect. This implies that it might be easy to confuse how salient something is to oneself with how salient it is to others, precisely because our own behavior stands out in our own minds, it can be hard to discern how well or even whether it is picked up by others. Absolutely, we may be attending the same meeting or Zoom conference call, but we are not all attending the same meeting or Zoom conference call, you know

what I mean. We we all have different perceptions of it based on our own biases, our own histories, our own pervasive thoughts are right, you know. Cognitive model of the task at hand and our role in it. I mean, our our subjective understanding of the meeting is going to different person to person exactly. So leading into the next thing here that the authors point out as possibly pointing to a spotlight effect. This is something that has been

documented known as the self as target bias. Quick example, so you're in a classroom the teacher gives a pop quiz about last night's reading. Johnny interprets this quiz as an attack on him personally because he believes that the teacher must believe that he didn't do the reading. And you know, I think even the best of us sometimes we fall prey to thinking like this something that is a a general sort of action applied to everyone. We think,

why are they doing this to me? Yeah? Yeah, especially if you have a light up, like a build up, build up of anticipation about a given you know, meeting or or social scenario. Yeah, And so the author's right quote like naive realism, then the self is target bias reflects a confusion between what is available to oneself and what is likely to be available to and hence guide

the actions of others. So again, Johnny might think, well, the teacher knows I didn't do the reading, and that's why she's giving the test today, or she's giving the pop quiz today. But the teacher doesn't know that. It's just you know, that's what he knows. And then finally, the authors point out that these previously document at ecocentric biases are very similar to the kind of egocentrism that Jean Piege observed pervading the cognition of young children early

in their development. One of the more important parts of growing up, in fact, is shedding some of that ecocentrism. But it turns out we don't shed it all. It still appears in adults, simply in diminished form. It's certainly more diminished in some people than it is in us. Yeah, but yeah, so it's young children. I mean, people with with kids will probably recognize this. Often seem not to grasp that other people have a different perspective than they do.

This happens when you're very young, and gradually, as you get older, you get more, you get more consistent about being able to accurately sort of model the minds of others. Understand that they have different desires, different perspectives than you do. And adults of course by the time of adulthood usually recognize this gap rationally, but still might have a hard

time sort of calibrating to predict it accurate. Really, now, the authors of this paper here say that what is the method that that we use to calibrate this this prediction. They say that it's probably based on anchoring and adjustment. Now, I was reading some follow up work by Gilovich about the the anchoring and adjustment controversy. Very brief refresher on anchoring.

We've done an episode about this in the past. So, like when you're trying to come up with an answer to a question like how much is this car worth? Or what do people think of the speech I just made? You don't necessarily reason toward an answer from a neutral starting point. We often tend to be influenced by sort of like data points or hypothetical answers that we can

kind of hang a hat on to begin with. Which might be one reason that you've got a good, you know, price written on the on the windshield of a car, even if that's not the price you would actually end up paying. Now, this was the Now, the anchoring and adjustment model was what the authors were working with at the time. That's the idea we often think by starting with an anchor, and then we just adjust our estimate

up or down from the anchor. I was reading some follow up work by Gilovich about the adjustment controversy, like, is this really the way we think? Is this really how we get to our anchor biased answers? Is it based on this adjustment process? Apparently that idea has come under some criticism in the past few decades, and there are arguments about how to best understand what's happening in

people's heads when they fall for the anchoring bias. We're not going to get into the weeds of that argument here. You can check out our full episode on the anchoring

bias for more depth. Um, but whatever the role of an adjustment mechanism in the brain, the anchoring effect does actually appear in many scenarios, and the authors in this paper are saying that the anchoring effect manifests in how we imagine the opinions of other people about us, because our our anchor, Our starting point is how we feel about ourselves, the stuff we notice about ourselves, and then we kind of reason from there to what other people's

opinions would be. Well that makes sense again coming back to the idea that we're using theory of mind to ultimately create simulations about the mind states of everyone in our lives from you know, from the person we're closest with, two people that are just you know, like supervisors or complete strangers and uh and and all of that is constructed with ourselves at the middle, like our model of ourselfs um is ultimately the like the I guess you

would say that the support structure on which this entire network is built, right, It's kind of like you can't build any bridges two ideas of other minds without starting from the foundation of your own. And that foundation of your own is going to come with a lot of baggage of like knowledge about yourself that other people don't have, and high levels of concern about your personal attributes that other people might not share, probably don't share. And that's

everybody we should need to drive that home. Like we're not just talking about like say, like it's like stereotypically egocentric person you know, or someone who has like like very obvious uh and pronounced personality flaws or anything like that, or dealing with with various mental health concerns or anything of that nature. But ultimately this naive perception is also self perception as well. Yeah, yeah, so I guess here we get to the actual empirical part of this research,

like how would you study this? How would you look for empirical evidence of a spotlight effect? And there are a number of studies that are covered in this paper. I'm going to discuss them in sequence and very broad strokes. Uh so, what, let me guess you know, what's going to be our our our key um implement in this study. Is it going to be like a god helmet that it scans my brain? Is it going to be uh, you know, some other kind of like high tech device

that I'm I'm cooking my nervous system up to. You're extremely close. No, we get into the cybernetics of a very Manilow T shirt. So the question is something maybe a lot of you have wondered before. Do people usually notice it's on your T shirt? Or do they just

not even care? It's a great question. I know when I wear a T shirt, I'm I I have certainly caught myself, especially at least in retrospect, thinking way too much about how others will perceive this shirt design, yeah, and what it's saying about me and my interest what is it broadcasting to the world, and that would be But at the same time, I feel like I'm always very interested in what other people's shirts say, to the point that I sometimes feel self conscious about trying to

understand what someone shure it is because I'm like, I don't want to be looking like caught staring at somebody's T shirt. I think you probably notice certain kinds of shirts more than others, Like you might pick up on cues that like, oh, this is a band T shirt, and I'm usually kind of interested in band t shirts, so when you see what this is, But like other things, if it's a i'd imagine like a football team or something,

you might not even take notice. That's true. I guess the shirts I'm usually interested in are I guess you know it's a certain extent band shirts, But if it has any kind of like monster type thing on it, then I definitely want to know what's going on. That's right, that's our brains. That's just our brains being our brains. Uh so so extremely simple set up for the study

dead simple. You get a group of participants to gather in a room and you have them basically in there like filling out questionnaires for an experiment that is supposedly about memory. And then another participant joins that group late, but before they go into the room, you require them to put on a Berry man Low T shirt. Then, after they've been in the room for a very brief time, you say, actually, this group has already gotten started, so

we're gonna hold you back for for another session. And then you have the Barry Manilow interloper leave the room, and then you ask everybody. Okay, you ask the interloper, the Berry man Low T shirt wearer, how many people in the room do you think noticed that you were wearing a Berry man Low T shirt? And then you ask the people who were in the room if they noticed who was on the T shirt? Right, You're just very simple comparing the person's expectation of how many people

noticed to how many people actually noticed. And true to prediction, the students who wore the T shirt tended to wildly overestimate how many people in the room would notice and be able to identify their Manilow T shirt. Generally, the Manilow interloper guests that about half of the other students on average would be able to identify their T shirt, and in reality only about twenty five percent of the

observers could do it. So in their minds, the people wearing this potentially conspicuous piece of clothing mentally doubled the percentage of people who they thought would notice it. Real quick, Joe, when you have the study you were looking at here, did you get to see this Manlo T shirt? No? I didn't. That's my big question because I'm currently looking at various very Manilow T shirts in um manage search here,

and they do. They do run the gamut here. We have some we have some very forgettable Manilow shirts, but we have some some real singers here. Uh yeah, well I think so. I could be wrong, but I think what it was was it was just like a picture of his face. Okay, well even then, like it's a it's a noticeable face. I mean you know that. That was That's part of the whole business proposal here. But there were also control groups for this study. They in

the control groups, this was an interesting calibration. The control groups were not in the room, but instead they watched the entire scene play out on a video recording, and then they were asked to estimate the number of observers who would notice the T shirt, and the control groups guessed much closer to the real number of people who would actually notice it, and they did not overestimate to

the extent that the person wearing the shirt did. And this was taken as evidence that quote the targets inflated estimates are not simply the result of misguided general theories about observers powers of servation. In other words, the relevant variable is I am the person wearing it. But that makes sense. Again, we are the we are the central

character in our own narrative. Okay, second study in this paper, so uh, It's worth noting that the majority of the students that they interviewed in the first study reported, in fact that wearing a very Manilow T shirt was considered embarrassing, that Barry Manilow was considered kind of corny and uncool. And it does make me wonder has Barry Manilow come full circle yet? Has he become cool again? I don't know, some of those shirts I was just looking at look

pretty cool. Yeah. I think that was part of the design of the first study, was that this is a figure that not everybody but a lot of people wearing the shirt. Would you know, it's not just like any face, it's somebody who a lot of students would probably feel kind of embarrassed to be wearing a shirt of. But the question is, like, does this phenomena hold for T shirts that would not be embarrassing? That would just be a picture of anybody, maybe anybody that the student liked.

So the second study tested for the spotlight effect with reference to non embarrassing personal details. It replicated the design of the first study, but it allowed students to choose a T shirt featuring a person that they liked and viewed as not embarrassing. So it might be a T shirt of like Bob Marley or Jerry Seinfeld or something. Way it was Jerry Seinfeld. Really was that this was he specifically mentioned? And yeah, yeah that was one of them.

How is that Jerry Seinfeld shirt not embarrassed? I don't know. Some people didn't think it was, you know, times changed, this was what you're thousands something like that. Yeah, the Bob Marley shirt I think remains that remains cool. But I just have questions about the Gary Science Felt shirt. Maybe this is again just tells more, says some more about my interests versus other people's interests. But maybe I am uncool for not wearing one. No, no, no, you're

very cool, Rubbert. But again there was a huge mismatch right between. Even when you're wearing a shirt that's not conspicuously embarrassing to a number of students, people just predicted that observers would notice who was on their shirt a lot more than the observers actually did. It just makes me think of of myself or anyone you know. You've got that new shirt and you're like, is today today?

Is today the day that I wear this, uh, this new shirt going unleashed, this bad boy on an unsuspecting world. Is the world ready? And yes? The thing is, yeah, they're ready, and yeah they'll they'll be fine. Also like, don't really to worry about um Yeah, so so okay, But that's appearance. That's just clothing items. What about for behavior?

Can we look for examples of this in behavior? So the third study tested for whether the spotlight effect exists not just for clothing, but for specifically stuff people say in a group setting. Quote. In particular, we sought to investigate whether people tend to believe that their positive and negative actions stand out to others more than they actually do.

And this was tested with stage discussion groups, So they would have a discussion group meeting, and then they would ask people afterwards to rate other participants on both positive and negative dimensions of their contributions. So you'd rate all the people you just had a group with, and you'd say how much did participant X due to advance the discussion. That'd be a positive mark, and then negative things would be like how many speech errors did participant X make

or how likely was participant X to offend someone? And participants also rated, of course, what they thought others would think of them, you know, then they turned it on themselves and they found the same thing. The study indicated that we tend to overestimate the salience of our behavior to others in both positive and negative ways. So it's not just like a self serving bias or self critical bias.

It's just we tend to assume people are paying way more attention and noticing way more about the stuff we do, both good and bad, which makes me think of like the hell razor tagline, it's like angels to some devils. To others. But really, maybe you think am I an angel or a devil? And in fact you're just kind of a gray blur that someone does not recall in any way. An Now, an important thing that's worth pointing out here is that people's self ratings on this discussion

group thing, we're not entirely divorced from reality. To the contrary, the study found that these ratings were in some ways based in reality. People who rated themselves as doing more to advance the discussion we're also on average rated by others as doing more to advance the discussion. And people who rated themselves as more likely to have said something that offended someone were in fact more likely to have

said something that offended someone. But it's the size of these effects, both positive and negative, that was exaggerated when people were thinking about themselves so in self evaluation and insightful comment that might have actually been an insightful comment to you it feels like, wow, that was earth shaking, I really changed the game, or a faux paw that other people might notice, but you know, doesn't really stand out to them all that much. It might become reputation

ruining this terror, this obsession. Yeah, that's interesting. Um, and again I wonder I can't help think about social media when you have systems that are set up so that comments that are insightful may see more earth shaking because they are being you know, re shared or retweeted or or lighthearted, etcetera. And then and then likewise, there is the negative reaction to the things as well. And of course those tend to be the extremes that we we

we hear about in a in a digital setting. Yeah, but even then, I think the reality is that, like most people are not paying attention to you and won't remember anything you did, right, right, it's just humbling in a kind of nice way. Yeah. Okay, a couple more studies, real quick. One of them in the fourth one, this recreated the early T shirt scenario, but then ask participants questions to probe how they came up with their estimates.

This is how the authors were trying to test whether or not it was an anchoring and adjustment mental process that people were using to to get to their mistaken assumptions about other people's views of them and uh so their model. Again, this could be it could turn out that this is not the best way to model the thinking going on here. But what they thought at the time was that people start with their own rich and

powerful sense of how they appear to others. They realize correctly that other people are not paying as much attention to them as they pay to themselves. So they may be adjust down from their own experience to a hypothetical other observer, but they don't adjust enough. So you know, how important was what I just did? Uh? Well, to me, it was a ten, But I know other people probably aren't going to rate it at ten, so I'll say it's a nine to them, but in reality was maybe

like a six, yeah, or a four. And then the last of the last of the studies, the fifth one. This one, I think established something that's very important that we can come back to in a minute. This tested habituation. If people are allowed a period to get used to wearing the unfamiliar very Manilow T shirt, will they feel less self conscious about others noticing it? And the answer

is yes. If you wear the T shirt for a while before going in front of other people, you will tend to imagine that fewer of them took notice of it. Then if you just put it on and then go in. But of course, in these scenarios, absolutely nothing has changed for the observers. The only thing that has changed is you. The more that you're more used to the shirt yourself, you're less conscious of it, so you imagine less consciousness

among others. So in this like if if I don't know if anyone has ever had this experience being you know, somebody who wears a well worn but offensive T shirt an inappropriate setting, um, like, you know, they're used to it. They're used to the potentially profane statement that is on it.

Everyone else and man, it might not be ready for Yes, I think this is actually a various tute observation and it will come back to something I want to get at right at the end here, should we take another break and then when we come back we can discuss some of the implications of this research. Let's do it. We'll be right back. Thank you. All right, we're back. We're continuing our discussion here of of the spotlight effect and uh and of course the various key shirt experiments

things that relate to that explanation. Yeah, so I wanted to talk about some commentary on and and implications from the spotlight effect to whatever extent this is a real effect. It does appear like it still stands. I mean, I would be interested to see some more recent research replicating this,

but but it looks pretty solid to me. One of the things that the lead author of the study we've been talking about, Gilovich, Uh, he's noted in another source he actually had an article about the spotlight effect for the Encyclopedia of Social Psychology edited by Baumeister and Vos, And in that article, Gilovich notes that research indicates the quote people of all ages are prone to the spotlight effect, but it appears to be particularly pronounced among adolescents and

young adults. So as you get older, the spotlight effect seems to work less powerfully on your brain. What would explain this, Well, one answer might be experienced right in Over time, you just learn through experience that people pay less attention to you and notice less about you than you expect them to. And it's possible this does play some role. Maybe you get conditioned, you kind of learn how things work in life, and you experience less of

this cognitive bias. But Gilovich identifies a different reason, and that reason is that social motivation is stronger when you're younger. Younger people show a heightened consciousness of and concerned for

their standing within social groups. Quote. But having a heightened concern with one's social standing means, by its very nature that one is vulnerable to having an excessive concern with one standing and hints is likely to overestimate the extent to which one is the target of others thoughts and attention. So I'd say to take away from this maybe a special message to like younger and like teenage listeners, like other people really probably are noticing less about you and

thinking less about you than you think they are. As shocking, is that maybe to hear. Another thing that that's related to this idea that the authors mentioned in their in their discussion section on their paper is the way that the spotlight effect relates to something that's known as the illusion of transparency. So the illusion of transparency is the belief that your internal states are more observable to others

than they actually are. We often assume that our unspoken thoughts and our feelings can be sort of sniffed out and discerned by people around us, But that's usually not true, not not to the extent that we think it is.

And there are examples of this from empirical research. For example, if you stage a mock negotiation where people are trying to, you know, negotiate to get to a certain price on something, people tend to imagine that they have given away more information about what they're trying to get than they actually have.

Another variation is that studies show that a lot of times people imagine that other people can tell when they are lying, but in reality, people can't actually tell when people are lying, or at least I mean some people maybe can tell some of the time, but most of the time, other people cannot tell if you're lying, cannot spot your lies with nearly as much accuracy as you think they can do with that information what you will,

I really don't. I think it's it's like, it's a great point because first of all, we all lie, like lying is is is part of our communication suite. You know, we're gonna individuals are gonna engage in it too, varying degrees, but you know, it is important to have that tool in your toolbox. You know, if someone shows you a picture of a baby, and and and and and you're expected to comment upon it, it is generally in your

best interest to lie. If you think that baby is ugly, right, or or at least find some way to uh that is not just comedic adherence to truth? Right, you can you can find something nice to say that isn't necessarily untrue. Right, And yet at the same time, lying can be, or at least only, feel like a high risk act, right. I mean, no one wants to be caught in a lie um, even if the stakes are ultimately kind of low.

I mean, I guess maybe even more so at times if the stakes are low, because why are you lying about that? Well, like, why didn't you say you didn't like this picture of my baby? Or I don't know, let me say, I can't think of specific example, but okay, here's a potential example where if someone says, hey, if you're seen Die Hard too, and you're like, oh, yeah, it's pretty good, and and maybe the thing is you

haven't seen it. You have no interest in saying maybe you think that the whole concept sounds kind of stupid, but you want to be polite about it. And you also don't want to be You don't want the plot to have to be explained to you now you know you can see it in the theater. You also don't want to hear your friend Ron surprise it for you. But then if they're like, oh, yeah, what was your favorite part? Well, crap. Now this has become a much

stickier situation because I'm lying about having seen die Hard too. Yeah. But people tend to assume that, like that fact that they're lying about having seen die Hard too is somehow leaking out of them in an observable way. And in some cases it might be like some people do have big tells when they're lying, but generally that information is not leaking out as much as people imagine it is.

And I wonder if this is compounded to a certain extent by the lying we observe in media, lying that is either exposed via lifting relevant media like here's a here's one scene of politicians saying one thing, and here's another here's the another bit of footage that shows that they're lying or more often overt lying by a fictional character, which of course is is played up for dramatic effect and is also an artificial situation, you know, and that we know they are lying to another care Oh yeah.

But it's also like there is there's a stock type of hero in like detective fiction and all that the person who can just magically tell when other people are lying, and that that skill. No, there's a wonderful character in the recent Watchman series on HBO looking Glass, Yes, played by the great Tim Blake. Nelson has that power. The character has the power, not not Nelson himself. Right, Yeah,

And we love characters like that, right. I mean, that's a really fun power to try to see realized in fiction. But uh, just lies are not as easy to sniff out as I mean eat to. To really detect aalize in reality, what you have to try to do is like trap people in contradictions and stuff like ask a bunch of follow up questions. It doesn't just leak out of your face that yes I'm telling a lie and you can smell it absolutely. And you know, I also

think about this in terms of religious upbringing. Um, I don't know about you, but the growing up in the sort of pen octagonical teachings of a Protestant church, there was always this idea that God and and also the devil and perhaps other entities like less your angels and demons whatever you were privy to your inner thoughts, you know, the whole idea that it wasn't just what you said and did that made you sinful. It was also what you were thinking about doing, or considering doing, or just

entertaining the mental images of doing. So there was this grain notion that your private thoughts are not private at all, at least not so far as supernatural entities are concerned. Yeah, that's right, And I guess it is possible that this could have a conditioning effect to make you assume that in general, your private thoughts are not private. Maybe they're observable not just two supernatural entities, but to other regular

entities that you interact with every day. Yeah, because I definitely remember at times, certainly when I was younger, sort of freaking out at times about just the idea of other humans being privd in my thoughts, you know, an idea that was probably also compounded by science fiction that's just lousy with psychics, right, um, And also these not quite psychics but just really insightful TV suits. The Hannibal lecter is basically they like look at you and tell

your whole life story. Yeah. But but then again, as we've discussed on the show before, this is this sort of fear is not entirely unfounded. Given the potential trajectory of some of our technology. That's true, but that's technology. I mean, normally people are not doing like AI, you know, learning on data sets about your social media use or whatever.

There was one more example given about the illusion of transparency that I really liked, which was that people overestimate did the extent to which observers could tell whether the drink they were drinking was pleasant or nasty tasting, even though they were supposed to use a neutral facial expression. So you give people drinks this one, this one tastes good, this one tastes disgusting, and you tell them they have to maintain a neutrol facial expression while they drink them.

People assumed, oh yeah, people can just read it on my face that you know that that was a nasty one. But it turns out people can't read all that. Well. Good to know when you have your next inner party. Um ye, hopefully it's gonna be the next thing after a competitive eating right now, So right now it's the people who wolfed down like thirty white castles or whatever. The next thing is, how many nasty drinks can you drink? I can see it becoming a big hit Okay, one

last thing. So the authors of this two thousand paper ask a question, when is the spotlight effect most pronounced and when is it least pronounced? Could there be such a thing as like a verse spotlight effect, a sort of mental cloak of invisibility where other people are noticing you more than you think they are, And the authors think, yeah, this is probably possible. They claim that this would probably correlate with the subject's own consciousness of their appearance or behavior.

So obviously, the more conscious you are of your own appearance and behavior, the more conscious of it you imagine other people are, and probably vice versa. If you're less conscious of yourself, you're imagining other people are less conscious of you. And so for this reason, it might be correlated somewhat to the novelty of what you're doing or wearing,

or what you look like or how you sound. So remember in the fifth study in in that paper, uh, the spotlight effect was less pronounced for people who had some time to get used to wearing a potentially embarrassing, conspicuous T shirt. So it's highly possible that we are most likely to manifest the spotlight effect when we're doing

something new or unusual. Well, that's interesting. It kind of ties back to what we're talking about earlier, about when you're about to say something in a meeting and you're putting a lot of cognitive effort into preparing for that and preparing to do something that you don't normally do. Yeah, exactly, takes more effort, it takes up more space in your brain. It's more salient to you, and you assume it's more

salient to other people. So it's possible. This isn't proven yet, but it's possible that the inverse effect, where we would underestimate how much other people are noticing our appearance and behavior, it's possible this happens when we are least conscious, meaning during highly familiar, routine or automatic behaviors. There's actually an example that has been studied here, uh and the example

and I thought this was interesting. So people underestimate the extent to which other people notice their cologne or perfume. So you cover yourself in a fragrance, you become accustomed to that fragrance and you stop noticing it. Right Olfactory desynsitization sets in. You no longer smell it yourself, so it basically disappears for you, but other people smell it

even if you don't expect them to. Yeah, yeah, I think we all have had that experience with with someone who has just outrageously powerful perfume, you know, like sometimes the extent that announces their presence. Yes, yes, sometimes people just lather up. And this makes me wonder about whether the spotlight effect is especially salient for appearance, because, of course, we normally can't really see ourselves when we're going about our lives. If we're in a regular business meeting talking,

we can't see our face. We might be able to see our bodies if we look down at it, but we're probably not looking down. We're probably looking up at the room. But we're also frequently suddenly reminded of our appearance when we walk in front of a mirror or log into a web meeting or something. So it might be the sort of perf mix of obliviousness in your regular behaviors and then the sudden shocking reminders of oh yeah, I look like this external people, and that kind of

keeps you on your toes. Like what if after putting on some cologne, you could suddenly smell it intensely again every hour or so yeah, I mean that's the mag You put it like that, it almost sounds like it would be helpful. But I don't feel like our experiences with our own footage in a zoom call or what have you is necessarily helpful. It really feels like sort of built in egocentric feedback. Yeah, because there's too much

of it. It's just constantly there. So anyway, if we assume that the spotlight effect is real, it is a something that's generally true about people might not be true to the same extent for everyone. But if this effect is correctly observed, what would the implications for our lives be. Well, Gilovich has actually gotten kind of kind of sweet about this,

so uh. He notes that, you know, there are studies that show that later in life, most people report that their major regrets about their lives concern things that they failed to do, rather than things that they did. It's not the same for everybody, but that is a much more common framing, and you've probably read about this before.

This is widely observed. So many of the things that people want to do but never do, they hold back from them out of a sense of self consciousness or anxiety about how people are going to perceive us, you know, for doing these things. So one easy example might be that you failed to ever take up playing a musical instrument because you fear that other people will judge you

as unskilled at playing it, especially at first. And so the research on the spotlight effects suggests that we are were very likely to be overestimating, perhaps even grossly overestimating, how much people would even notice whatever it is that we're afraid of doing. And the authors of the study right quote. The lesson of this research then is that we might all have fewer regrets if we properly understood

how much attention or inattention our actions actually draw from others. Yeah, that is it is kind of a sweet twist on it. You know, it's like saying, look, go go for it, go through you live your dream, because nobody's really going to pay that much attention even when it falls flat dance like nobody's watching, because probably nobody is watching, or if they are watching, they might not even remember. I mean, it's just like you're you're probably way over concerned about

possible minor faux pause or looking weird or awkward. Yeah, like they're probably even if they're they're watching you, and they're thinking about it. They're probably thinking, oh, man, do I look like that when I danced by myself? What do I look like when I danced by myself? This? Uh, this reminds me. That's talking about situations where you realize that it may be perceived as as weird by other people, were embarrassing by other people. So so I've mentioned Star

Wars like three times so far. I'm mostly tracking the house here, and me and my son are super in Star Wars. He has a couple of lightsabers and he'll he'll often ask me to go out to to have a lightsaber battle with him, which is something we have to do outside because otherwise we would destroy things in the house. And we have to do it in the front yard because the mosquitoes are too bad in the backyard. Um,

so we'll have this fight in the front yard. People driving by we'll be able to see it, which generally I imagine they'll say, oh, well, there's a dad having a lightsaber battle with with his son. That's great, the sweetest thing they'll see all day. But occasionally, my son, who's much he gets so into this. Occasionally he'll have to run over to the side of the house to like fight a pretend droid or something, which leaves me in the front yard apparently by myself fighting pretend droids.

And I realized when that happens, people may drive by and think that I have lost my mind, um, which I don't know. I'm I'm okay, I'm ultimately okay. I think you got anything to worry about. Man. That's that that that's going to be the ray of sunshine in the in the day of so many people driving by. Seriously, if I was driving by and I saw uh, and I saw some people having a lightsaber duel in their front yard, I would be like, that's you know, there's hope,

a new hope. Maybe maybe that's what I'm doing. I'm giving people hope that they're like, I didn't realize I could do that as a grown up, that I could just uh get a lightsaber and uh and start having pretend battles in my front yard. I'm gonna do it. That's gonna make this quarantine situation a lot easier. Along the same lines, I am extremely in favor of adults climbing trees. There's this bizarre idea that adults shouldn't climb trees.

Climbing trees is for children. Why adults should climb trees all the time? I love a good climbing tree. It's a good skill to have. I see people in movies having to do it all the time to escape, like you know, robot and monsters and whatnot. Yeah, so go for it. Yeah, those like those Boston Dynamics dog robots are coming for you. Where are you gonna go? You gotta get up the oak, like suddenly you got to climate tree and you haven't been practicing for twenty or

thirty years. Good luck? And then what if you have to fight it with a lifesaver? Also, you've got to keep these skills war you know, these are the skills one needs to survive in the waste land. Alright, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it out there. I think we have. There's a lot of material in here for everyone to think about, and we of course await listener responses to this. How how do you perceive the spotlight effect in your own life or in the lives

of others? Has this forced you to to rethink anything going on in the world around you, or how you indeed engage in your daily or weekly conference digital conference calls for them. In the meantime, if you'd like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, including that when we mentioned anchor in the mind dealing with anchoring, you can find those wherever you get your podcasts. I will say this, you can certainly find our our I heart radio listing by going to stuff to Blow

your Mind dot com. And if you go there, you'll see a little part of the page and says show links. There is a store link there, and if you go there you will find T shirts that are bringing it around. And some of them are cool. Uh, some of them I would personally be embarrassed to wear. You'll have to look at them and trying to decide which which design is which. But we charge every listener to buy one

cool T shirt and one extremely embarrassing T shirt. Yes, well we have both there, so go check them out if you so desire. Um. I don't know. None of them have very manilol on the front though, so you need to do a separate image search to see what I'm talking about. There. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,

or just to say hi. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com s. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen me to your favorite shows.