Under the Spotlight

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve felt like the whole world was watching you? Everyone was eyeing off your movements in great detail. They noticed every tiny blemish or weakness you had, either when performing, when you got up to gave a speech, or even when you were having a “bad hair day!” You felt under the microscope, the spotlight was brightly shining right at you…and only you! 😳

If you have experienced this feeling before, then you’ve probably fallen victim to what social psychologists call “The Spotlight Effect.” This is a phenomenon in which you believe that people are paying much more attention to you than they actually are.

This effect can happen in a wide range of circumstances: you make a little mistake in a concert, say something stupid to a group of friends, or feel embarrassed by the food stain you’ve left on your shirt after lunch. All of these things heighten your self-awareness, leading to the assumption that everyone is noticing the exact same things that you are focusing on.

So why does this happen?

The reason for this effect is because we tend to forget that everyone around us is experiencing different things than we are. You are always at the centre of your own world (sounds obvious and egocentric, I know!), so it is nearly impossible to accurately evaluate how the people around you notice your actions. The tendency is to focus more on yourself, and think that everyone else is focusing on you as well, yet studies have shown that your perceptions are generally WAY off! Research has also shown this phenomenon to be extremely common, especially when you’re doing something out of the ordinary, such as performing!

Enter Barry Manilow!

One of the first studies on the Spotlight Effect was conducted in 1999. It involved getting college students to put on a deliberately embarrassing T-Shirt before walking into a room of their peers, and then completing a survey form. This particular T-Shirt had a large picture of world-famous, yet somewhat cringe-worthy pop singer, Barry Manilow. In the study, the researchers noted that Barry Manilow was “a musician who is not terribly popular among college students”, hence why his face was chosen to adorn the ridiculous T-shirt! 😆 This was done to give participants maximum embarrassment, and therefore the strong feeling of being “in the spotlight.” (Sorry to all Barry Manilow fans out there!)

What this study found was that the participants thought their embarrassing T-shirt would be noticed by a large number of their peers (they estimated that around half of their peers would pay attention to their questionable choice of attire), yet the results found that only around ¼ of the students actually noticed Barry Manilow’s gorgeous face on the shirt.

Because the participants wearing the T-shirt were more focused on themselves and their own embarrassment, this led them to think that a lot more of their peers would take notice as well. But the study found that the participant’s perception was significantly overestimated, with a lot fewer students actually paying attention to the fashion faux pas.

In a follow-up study, researchers found that the spotlight effect was significantly reduced in participants when they had been given some time to get accustomed to wearing the new T-shirt. Once they got used to it, their focus moved away from themselves and their own embarrassment, and onto other, seemingly more important things!

Further studies have also explored the spotlight effect across a range of everyday social settings, including in performance situations with an observing audience, as well as in group discussions.

So what does this mean for us as performers?

Feeling the spotlight effect when we’re performing on stage is a completely normal sensation, and something that can take a bit of getting used to. The more you perform, the more you get used to the effect, and the less you notice it over time, just like getting used to wearing the Manilow T-shirt.

But it can also come as some comfort that many of your tiny mistakes or slight imperfections probably won’t be picked up by a vast majority of people around you, even the musician sitting nearby. Any embarrassing mistakes that you made are generally magnified, and probably nowhere near as bad or disastrous as you think. This means that you can go easy on yourself and realise that mistakes are just part of every performance you play in.

It’s also good to think of the last performance where you sat in the audience. Were you 100% focused on what every single musician was doing for the entire concert? Probably not! Audience members and fellow musicians will never be completely fixated on what you are doing the entire time, as they are often caught up in their own personal experience. Therefore audiences will generally evaluate your playing as significantly better than what you thought. This can actually give you the courage to really go for it on stage, knowing that even a self-perceived “disaster”, will never be as bad as you really think it is! Phew! 😌

P.S. If you don’t know who Barry Manilow is, then I urge you to do a quick Google search and check out his work – it’s pure GOLD! Here’s his version of Copacabana.

P.P.S. I love finding studies like the one mentioned, where the researchers obviously have a bit of a sense of humour! Unfortunately I don’t get to laugh out loud at too many research papers, so this one was a nice surprise! Here’s the link to the study if you’re interested.