According to the research, the spotlight effect is “an egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance”. (Brown & Stopa, 2007). This basically means that the average person has the tendency to think that more people are paying more attention to them than they are.
One study suggests that the spotlight effect is caused by our egocentrism and inability to consider the observers own actions and thoughts about themselves. (Gilovich, Kruger, & Medvec, 2002). The later point means that we are incapable of understanding that one person’s perspective is different than our own. Because we are bombarded by what we see, know, and understand, it is difficult to step outside of that and put yourself into a world where hypothetically those things don’t exist. You cannot fool yourself into not knowing something that you know, therefore you cannot forget your own perspective as you try to understand or predict someone else’s.
This spotlight effect is seen for both good and bad attention. One article concluded that those with the spotlight effect that do something embarrassing are only judged harshly if the observer is unable to have empathy (see things through the eyes of the other person). (Epley, Savitsky, & Gilovich, 2002). But it isn’t just the embarrassing things that we think people attend to. In another study, people overestimated how much people judged the way they spoke in a group setting, thinking others paid attention to the good and bad things they said far more than people actually did. (Gilovich, Savistky, & Medvec, 2000). We think people watch out for both our negative and positive behaviors.
According to a Pew survey, 11% of online American adults participate in updating their status either on facebook or twitter (Lenhart & Fox, 2009). Because of the popularity of such habits, research has been done to assess some of the reasoning behind and eventually effects of such public self-disclosure. One study analyzed profiles quantitatively and found that 1. the vast majority of students have a facebook account (at this particular university). 2. Only a small percentage of those students restricted their profile access to University staff. 3. A significant amount of student’s profiles contained contact info, course schedules, positive reference to the university, and pictures of the student consuming alcohol. (Kolek & Saunders, 2008). This shows that there is a huge potential for a wide variety of effects with so much personal information being available to practically anyone about practically anyone. A few studies have shown the results of perceptions of people based on their facebook profiles. One such study’s results indicate that having a facebook profile does not affect the perceptions students have on their professors (Hewitt & Forte, 2006). The study did go on however to discuss the practical implications on one’s professional life with certain inappropriate disclosures online.
Connecting the use of status updating and the spotlight effect is self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is exactly what it sounds like, when you talk about yourself, especially more intimate things about yourself. Collins & Miller (1994), conducted a meta analysis of all the studies on disclosure and concluded that self-disclosure is linked with being liked more by people who don’t self-disclose. In connecting self-disclosure to the technological world, one article outlines three difference studies looking at how self-disclosure is higher when communication is “computer mediated”. People are far more likely to self-disclose online than face to face. This Computer Mediated self-disclosure may be linked to the fact that those seeing your self-disclosed information cannot actually see you. (Joinson, 2001). In discussing the implications of such use of computer mediated self-disclosure, Mazer, Murphy, and Simonds (2007), suggest a balance between self-disclosure in a mature professional manner as respect and their careers could be linked to a poor image on facebook.
Looking at all of the research it is not hard to see that self-disclosing online through status updates could be a perfect example of the spotlight effect. So my research was formed in order to prove that. My goal in my research was to look at how people update their status, what they thought about that, and then how many people attended to those updates. I guessed that less people would be paying attention than the updaters assumed.
Results of the archival data:
The results of the archival data were analyzed using Excel. The actual archived data was not included because of privacy issues as even with making the facebook user anonymous the content of the status updates was often enough to determine who the writer was. Instead, each status update is listed and number of comments or “likings” are recorded on an excel spreadsheet. The link to the data can be found on the Multi-Media, Links, Relavent Information, ect page.
The first day of archival data was retrieved on Tuesday, January 26the at 3:50pm. Eleven status updates were included on my newsfeed during the two hour time slot. Each update had an average of 2.45 comments and 0.09 “like” button hits with a total of an average of 2.55 overt attention given per update. 55.93% of updates were given some kind of overt feedback either through comments or “like” buttons. The second archive data retrieval day was Sunday, January 31st at 11am. Twenty two status updates were included on my newsfeed during the two hour time slot. Each update had an average of 1.18 comments and 0.23“like” button hits with a total of an average of 1.41 pieces of overt attention given per update. 50.0% of updates were given some kind of overt feedback either through comments or “like” buttons. The third day of archival data was retrieved on Friday, February 5th at 6pm. Twenty eight status updates were included on my newsfeed during the two hour time slot. Each update had an average of 1.89 comments and .04 “like” button hits with a total of an average of 1.93 overt attention given per update. 60.71% of updates were given some kind of overt feedback either through comments or “like” buttons.
Looking at all three days archived, on average updates received 1.84 comments and were “liked” 0.12 times. That is an average of 1.96 cases of attention given to each status update. Between the three days, 55.93% of status updates were given some sort of overt attention.
Results of the survey data:
The results of the survey were analyzed per the surveymonkey.com webpage. 29 people responded and completed the survey. Of those, 6 people commented on the status update containing the link outing themselves publicly as having taken the survey. The link to the statistics analyzed can be found on the Multi-Media, Links, Relavent Information, ect page.
The responses to each of the survey questions are given below
QUESTION 1:
We see that status updating is highly prevalent among the survey participants.
QUESTION 2:
This question was to assess the participant’s views on how often they are being attended to. Clearly, the participants of the survey recall being attended to more often than not. Only one person claimed to be attended to every single time. The results of this question illustrate the belief that people do have the perception that others are paying attention to them.
QUESTION 3:
QUESTION 4:
Questions three and four were included when my project included content analysis of status updates which eventually had to be dropped for sake of ethics and the privacy of the participants who could not be given a chance to consent. Instead now they can be looked at in terms of what people claim they like to read versus what they post. Interestingly, people claim to practice posting personal activity information more than they claim to enjoy reading other’s personal activity posts. This means that some people responded to the survey saying that they don’t like reading what they themselves post for others to read.
QUESTION 5:
This question shows that the majority of the survey participants comment on other people’s status updates. Only two people claimed to never comment on other’s status updates, but this should not be taken to mean they do not attend to people’s updates. Obviously, based on the fact that they did this survey which was posted on my status update, these two people do attend to other people’s statuses they just claim to not comment. This says a lot about the spot light effect as everyone is in agreement that they attend to other people’s updates.
Results of the survey should be examined knowing that the sample was extremely biased and with complete anonymity and no feed back there was no reason for the participant to be honest.
