Invisibility cloak illusion
People-watching is an age-old pastime. People notice and observe the people around them all the time—on trains, at cafés, waiting in line, at cocktail parties and office meetings, and beyond. Pretty much anywhere there are other people, we spend a good deal of time watching them, wondering who they are, and assessing what they are like. But despite all the watching people do of others, people rarely feel as if they, themselves, are being observed as they go about their daily lives. People feel relatively invisible (Boothby, Clark, & Bargh, 2017). This work draws on sociologist Erving Goffman’s classic work on “civil inattention,” finding that people believe that they observe, notice, and think about other people more than other people observe, notice, and think about them. People believe that 1) they are more socially observant than are other people, and also that 2) they are not being observed nearly as much as they actually are. Whether in a crowded conference room or a waiting for the train near just one other person, people feel relatively invisible, a mistaken belief called the invisibility cloak illusion.
This illusion is caused in part because people egocentrically assume that others’ attention is focused on the same thing on which one’s own attention is focused. Making a specific feature of oneself salient to people (e.g., by giving them a new shirt to wear) causes them to overestimate how much attention another person pays to that feature (e.g., the shirt). One result of people’s attention becoming so focused on this salient feature, people underestimate how much attention is on the rest of them. In one study, although people attended to participants’ shirts in equal amount regardless of whether the shirt was newly donned in the lab or not, participants who were wearing a newly provided shirt thought the other person was paying significantly more attention to their shirt than those who simply wore their own shirt.
The upshot is that when something is new and therefore at the forefront of your mind (e.g., the stain you noticed on your shirt while in a client meeting), you believe others are paying considerable attention to it. But once you adapt to it, it fades into the background of your experience and you underestimate how much attention others are paying to it. What you don’t realize is that even though something is no longer salient to you, it is still salient to others seeing it for the first time.
In short, people are habituated to themselves, and so they often fail to realize what about them is salient to others, causing them to underestimate how much their appearance and behavior are noticed by the people around them.
Publications
Media Coverage
Smart Drug Smarts (podcast interview)
the Thought Gap AFTER CONVERSATION
After conversations, people continue to think about their conversation partners. They remember their stories, revisit their advice, and replay their criticisms. Such thoughts come readily to mind. But do people realize that their conversation partners are doing the same? After conversations, people are put in a remarkably difficult position with respect to knowing their conversation partner’s thoughts, as they no longer have access to the real-time feedback provided by social interaction. This is a significant psychological transition, and it results in people systematically underestimating the extent to which they remain on their conversation partner’s mind following conversations (Cooney*, Boothby*, & Lee, 2021).
The origins of this thought gap bias lie in the differential availability of one’s own thoughts about an interaction partner vs. that person’s thoughts about them. High ruminators exhibit a more pronounced thought gap than do low ruminators, and people believe others’ thoughts about a topic are more prevalent to the extent that they have evidence of people thinking about that topic. People rarely express to you that they think about you when you’re not together and so, lacking direct access to others’ thoughts, you are inclined to underestimate how much others think about you. We have additionally found that people’s beliefs about how frequently others think about them has effects above and beyond the valence of those thoughts, with consequences, for example in the likelihood of reconciliation after an argument.
This research has several implications for the workplace. First, people may feel less effectual at their jobs than they actually are. Think of someone who doesn’t realize how frequently his coworkers have reflected on his contributions at their recent meeting or how much a potential client has thought about his pitch in the days that followed. Second, the relative status and power of the people involved would likely matter. Think of a manager who has no idea that her offhand comment on Friday afternoon caused an employee to spend the entire weekend ruminating about it. It might also work in the reverse, with employees not realizing that their managers do not simply forget about them when they leave the office for the day. These failures to realize one’s influence may result in decreased motivation or engagement at work. Feelings of social isolation can be quite damaging; this research suggests that we are on others’ minds more than we realize, with significant consequences for people’s well-being.
Publications
Cooney, G.*, Boothby, E. J.*, & Lee, M. (2021). The thought gap after conversation: Underestimating the frequency of others’ thoughts about us. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Data and materials available publicly at: https://osf.io/rny4b/
(*indicates equal authorship)