The Focus Effect: Why People Seem To Be Looking At Us When They Don’t
The focus effect refers to the tendency to think that the people around us are paying more attention to us than they actually are. Dozens of studies in social psychology have supported this phenomenon. What explains this effect? Well, basically it’s the result of our creeping egocentricity.
We are all at the center of our own universes. This does not mean that we are arrogant. Or that in an exercise of arrogance, we appreciate ourselves more than others. Rather, it means that our entire existence is analyzed from our own experiences.
We use these sensations that people are looking at to assess the world around us, including other people. However, not only are others unaware of your subjective ideas and your situation, but they are also the center of their own worlds, in addition to having other “distractors”.
When we focus on a concern that touches us, we often assume that it deserves the attention of others as well. This is the heart of what social psychologists call the focusing effect.
Focus Effect: Barry Manilow’s T-Shirt
The Barry Manilow experiment was carried out at a university in the United States. The researchers then invited 10 people to go through the psychology department. They asked 9 of them to arrive at a certain time in a room to fill out forms.
Instead, they asked the tenth person to come 15 minutes later. The latter entered the office of one of the people in charge of the experiment. He was told to put a large tee shirt over his clothes, a tee shirt that many found “ugly” and “flashy” with the image of singer Barry Manilow.
After putting on this T-shirt, this person was taken to the salon, where everyone was filling out the form. After leaving her there to wait for 5 minutes, she was told it didn’t matter if she was late and could start filling out the same forms.
5 minutes later, he was told that arriving late in the room affected the results and that it was better to withdraw from the test.
Eventually, she was asked to try and estimate how many people noticed she was wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt. All the people who played this role in the experiment then replied that about 8 people had noticed.
Then the other people who only filled out forms were consulted. And in reality, none of them noticed the T-shirt.
The focusing effect: overestimating my presence
Participants overestimated the number of people in this room who noticed the T-shirt. If you put yourself in their situation, judgment makes a lot of sense. If you’re forced to go into a room with a T-shirt that you think is ridiculous, you’ll think everyone will notice.
The same study was reproduced with a Vanilla Ice t-shirt. The researchers sarcastically clarified that Vanilla Ice was a “pop cone whose 15 minutes of fame had elapsed when this study was conducted.”
Disable focus effect
However, there is one exception to all of this that we would like to highlight. In another study, when researchers allowed participants time to get used to wearing their new pop culture outfit before heading to the other room, they weren’t as vulnerable to the focus effect.
They were less likely to think that too many people were noticing the T-shirt. This is important, because such a fact gives us an idea of why the focus effect is occurring. The focusing effect really occurs because people are very focused on their own presence. If people are distracted or accustomed, the effect of concentration decreases.
So, in those times when you think everyone is paying attention to something you’ve done, ask yourself if it isn’t just because you are obsessed with the idea. The reality is that all of the other people who you think pay attention to you, in turn, care about their behavior and think they pay a lot of attention to themselves.
Does everything refer to us?
One of the most restrictive beliefs we have as human beings is the endless ability to think that everything refers to us. In many aspects of our life, we feel like there is a great light shining on every little movement we make. We feel that we are being watched and that the rest of the world is aware of us.
This poses a big problem because this feeling severely limits the room for maneuver. When we feel “watched” we want to please others. We spend an infinite amount of energy trying to balance the expectations of everyone around us.
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