ABSTRACT
The chapter documents the existence of the spotlight effect in several ways. The spotlight effect applies both to moments of triumph and moments of embarrassment: participants overestimated how highly others would rate such things as the extent to which they advanced the discussion and the glaringness of their speech errors. This, of course, has significant implications for an anchoring and insufficient adjustment interpretation of any phenomenon, be it the correspondence bias, the above average effect, egocentric language use, or the spotlight effect. In one study, the chapter asked people to tell the year Washington was first elected president and the year the second European explorer landed in the West Indies. Thus, the anchoring and adjustment processes examined in the chapter are likely to have direct implications for the way people perceive themselves in social situations, the way they estimate others' reactions, and ultimately, the way their self-conceptions are constructed and maintained.
