Katy Milkman: In the 1998 movie The Truman Show, the lead character is Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey. Truman lives in a meticulously constructed world where every moment of his life is broadcast to a global audience. Unbeknownst to him, his family, friends, and even his town are part of a massive reality TV set. In the film, Truman begins to notice inconsistencies, and he slowly uncovers the truth, that he's the unwitting star of a 24/7 show.
Truman's experience is the ultimate exaggeration of a feeling we all get from time to time, that other people are paying very close attention to our appearance, our choices, and our behavior. Truman's world is literally designed to allow strangers to watch his every move. But in real life, most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to notice our zits, bad hair days, minor mistakes, and awkward comments. And if they do notice them, they usually quickly forget.
Truman's growing fear of and panic over being the center of attention is justified, but ours usually isn't. When we're sure we're being scrutinized, science suggests it's typically not the case. In this episode, we'll dive into why this disconnect occurs, and you'll hear a story about a king who became terrified of a type of scrutiny that never materialized.
I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.
Lionel Logue: It is partly his dislike of the microphone that causes the speech impediment. It must have been engendered when he made his first speech in Wembley Stadium. It was a terrible failure, and the scar has remained ever since.
Katy Milkman: Lionel Logue penned this diary entry in 1937, over a decade after an event that was humiliating to Albert, the Duke of York. Logue was a speech and language therapist, and that year, he was preparing the duke to speak on the day of his own coronation as king. It was a speech the duke was never meant to give.
King George VI: It is with a very full heart I speak to you tonight. Never before has a newly crowned king …
Katy Milkman: The Duke of York, Albert Frederick Arthur George, also known as Bertie, was the father of Queen Elizabeth II and grandfather to King Charles III. He was the son of King George V and Queen Mary. For this story though, we'll focus on Albert and his older brother, David.
Adrian Phillips: Both he and his brothers were actually pretty normal boys. They played around with their schoolmasters, they larked, they had jokes. The overhanging presence, though, was their father, George V, who was a very severe disciplinarian.
Katy Milkman: This is Adrian.
Adrian Phillips: Hello, my name is Adrian Phillips.
Katy Milkman: Adrian is a historian specializing in Britain in the middle of the last century. And in writing a book about Albert's brother, he learned a lot about the disciplinary environment the sons of King George V grew up in, an environment especially unforgiving to young Albert.
Adrian Phillips: The most important thing was that he was left-handed, which in those days was deemed a great drawback. His father was particularly upset at the idea of a son being left-handed, and everything was done to force him into right-handedness from an early age, which seems to have created a whole web of traumas and tensions.
Katy Milkman: Unlike Albert's brother David, who is described as being …
Adrian Phillips: Extremely self-confident, very outgoing, no shyness, whatever.
Katy Milkman: Albert was more reserved, shy, and he stuttered. He had a stammer.
Adrian Phillips: His official biographer, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, suffered from a stammer himself, so actually wrote his book with an intimate personal knowledge of exactly the problems that the stammer brings along with it. It brings feelings of inferiority, tension, complexes, particularly in a period of history and at a social class where there was very little tolerance and very little support for, in the largest sense, defects.
Katy Milkman: Public appearances by the royals in the early part of the 20th century weren't as highly publicized as they are today.
Adrian Phillips: We're talking about a much more restricted circulation of information, and also because you had a much more respectful press in those days. That was not the kind of thing that would be mentioned at all, so it would be little known about and just not discussed in anything other than the most intimate family circles.
Katy Milkman: So Albert's stammer was not public knowledge, and compared to his father and older brother, Albert was much less in the public view until a fateful speech at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1925. If you've seen the film The King's Speech, this is where the movie begins.
Adrian Phillips: If you look at the newsreels of him at Wembley, which were silent—it's the technology of the day—there is just couple of seconds where you see his face, and he's standing up next to clergymen delivering a speech, and he looks absolutely stricken. He looks like somebody who is in a very, very bad place.
We know he didn't do well, just how well I don't think is possible to say, but certainly in terms of the damage it did to him psychologically, it was huge.
Katy Milkman: It's likely that Albert felt his speech was a disaster. He had tried and failed at several forms of speech therapy before this event. His biographer describes his feelings at the time as "a secret dread that the hidden root of the affliction lay in the mind rather than the body." And yet as a senior royal, public speaking was unavoidable and a growing duty. He felt he had to do something. That's when the duke's wife, Duchess Elizabeth, found Lionel Logue.
The film The King's Speech features Colin Firth as the stammering Albert, all stiff in his naval uniform, and Geoffrey Rush as the unorthodox therapist Lionel Logue, barefoot in his modest London office. The real-life Logue was an Australian with a background in acting and an unconventional approach to speech therapy.
Adrian Phillips: Not being a native Britisher, he was not going to get terribly worried about being ultra-respectful to the second in line to the throne. He was just another patient. He was just a human being with a problem who needed help.
Katy Milkman: Logue's practice was shaped by what he'd experienced after World War I.
Adrian Phillips: He'd come to speech therapy. He'd observed in a lot of cases the dreadful effect of serving in combat in the First World War had on people psychologically, and stutters were a very common occurrence.
Katy Milkman: Albert's wife convinced him to give Lionel Logue's therapy a try, and she accompanied Albert to his sessions.
Adrian Phillips: I think his starting point was the very simple one of breathing. It's a very natural part of speech. If you're lucky enough not to have a problem, you just don't notice it. It's when you start off with a problem that you need consciously to control how you breathe in order to start articulating clearly and fluently. Then, there was simple question of relaxation.
Katy Milkman: Logue's approach emphasized humor, patience, and sympathy, and Albert, a trained naval officer, did as he was told.
Adrian Phillips: He was pretty open to direct individual human-to-human way of being handled.
Katy Milkman: Here's one of Logue's early diary entries about his new patient.
Lionel Logue: Has an acute nervous tension, is of a nervous disposition, well-built with good shoulders, an extraordinary habit of clipping small words, and very often hesitating.
Katy Milkman: Together, they made remarkable progress, not just with exercises and prepared speeches, but with something deeper, the duke's confidence. Soon after meeting Logue, Albert embarked on a royal tour of Australia. He spoke publicly and relatively fluently at numerous small events, and for nearly a decade, the stammer that once paralyzed him was diminished. It seemed the biggest struggle was behind him. Then came 1936. His father, King George V, died.
Speaker 5: London is hushed, and all over the world, countless millions are waiting to take part in spirit in the last journey of his majesty King George V. A wave in the crowd …
Katy Milkman: His brother David ascended to the throne, crowned as King Edward VIII, only to abdicate months later in order to marry a divorcee, which was a royal scandal at the time.
King Edward VIII: A few hours ago, I discharged my last duty as king and emperor. And now that I have been succeeded by my brother, the Duke of York, my first words must be to declare my allegiance to him.
Katy Milkman: And suddenly, unexpectedly, Albert was now set to be king.
Speaker 7: I hear present to you King George, your undoubted king. Wherefore all you who are come this day to do your homage and service. Are you willing to do the same?
Speaker 8: God save King George.
Katy Milkman: From the sidelines, Albert was thrust into the limelight. He was crowned King George VI, and now it seemed the world was listening for what he had to say.
Adrian Phillips: Immediately after the abdication, the Archbishop of Canterbury mentioned the stutter publicly and made it clear that it was a disadvantage.
Katy Milkman: Radio broadcasts and many more public appearances were in store for Albert.
King George VI: Logue, I've got the jitters. Woke up at 1:00 after dreaming I was in parliament with my mouth wide open and couldn't say a word.
Katy Milkman: That's another diary entry from Logue, from correspondence between himself and the new king. Logue was often at the king's side in advance of public speaking, marking up speeches with where to take breaks and where to breathe. Logue would visit the palace before the king's addresses to Parliament. He'd visit Windsor Castle before the Christmas broadcasts.
But the speeches with the widest public scrutiny and where the king was under the most pressure were the ones during the war. One of the most consequential speeches followed Great Britain's declaration of war on Nazi Germany in 1939.
King George VI: For the second time in the lives of most of us, we are at war over …
Adrian Phillips: All the rhetoric and performance of leadership could come from a politician. What was wanted from the head of state was a much quieter, much broader message about the simple faith, the question of duty, and what was needed to win the war.
Katy Milkman: The public was listening for reassurance that the war would end and somehow all would be right in the world again. No speech was ever more important than the one he was scheduled to give nine months into the war.
Adrian Phillips: This was on Empire Day, which just happened to fall in the middle of the Dunkirk evacuation, when Britain was in absolutely desperate military state, when there was a strong chance that the bulk of the army was going to be lost. So it really was a moment of national crisis, and that speech was vital.
He and Logue worked on it long and hard, which was especially difficult because, given the uncertainty over the military and diplomatic situation, exactly what situation the king was going to have to talk about was not clear. It was open-ended almost to the moment that the mic went on.
King George VI: And let no one be mistaken. It is no mere territorial conquest that our enemies are seeking. It is the overthrow, complete and final, of this empire and of everything for which it stands.
Katy Milkman: Slow and steady, the king communicated hope and resolve to the empire with sincerity and quiet determination. His decision to stay in London during the blitz of that same year, even after a direct hit on Buckingham Palace, gained him public respect, and his calm, measured delivery of speeches became a comforting trademark.
Another diary entry from Logue after the king's Home Guard speech in 1944:
Lionel Logue: After the broadcast, I shook hands with the king and congratulated him and asked him why he stopped on the W, and he replied with a grin. "I did it on purpose."
"On purpose?" I said.
He said, "Yes. If I don't make a mistake, people might not know it was me."
Katy Milkman: One year later, on VE day, marking the end of the war in Europe, the king rehearsed a speech with Logue as usual.
Lionel Logue: I leave the table at 8:35 and go back to the broadcasting room. The king joins me, and we have another run through. This leaves us just two minutes. One small alteration, and then the queen comes in, as she always does, to wish him luck.
Katy Milkman: After the broadcast, the king and queen stepped out onto the balcony, illuminated by the floodlights and the massive nighttime crowds. The man who stood before them was not defined by any flaw. What the public saw and heard was a dignified and deeply respected king.
Seth Tichenor: There are tricks. There are tools. There are things stutterers can do that will make them not sound like they're overtly stuttering. It's just you're not showing this thing. You're masking it.
Katy Milkman: This is Seth.
Seth Tichenor: Hi, my name is Seth Tichenor.
Katy Milkman: Seth is a researcher, speech language pathologist, an assistant professor at Duquesne University. He knows firsthand, as a stutterer himself, how the king might've felt having to perform his very public role. Seth works with many patients who also want control over how they're perceived.
Seth Tichenor: Stutterers think that, if they stutter, they can't do things, right? They can't speak here. They can't have this conversation. They can't give a public speech. They can't say what they want to say. What they equate that to is "Well, I can't do this job," right? They catastrophize. They mind read where they'll say something like, "Oh, well, someone's judging me for my stutter."
Katy Milkman: But how harshly are people judging those that stutter? How harshly might the public have actually judged the king for his stammer?
Seth Tichenor: I have this conversation with folks in therapy all the time, where the caveat is, yeah, there's jerks in the world, right? However, most of the world is more understanding than you think.
Katy Milkman: In fact, it may not just be that people are more understanding than you think. It may be that they're paying less attention to your diction than you think, and that is why the story at the heart of The King's Speech, a story of massive anxiety fueling preparation for a major oratory event, is the perfect entree for the topic of interest in today's episode.
Seth Tichenor is an assistant professor and program director at the Duquesne University Stuttering Clinic. Adrian Phillips is a historian and author specializing in early 20th-century Britain. His book The King Who Had to Go examines the abdication crisis of Edward VIII. And a second book, From Churchill to Eden, explores the political world George VI had to navigate during and after World War II. You can learn more about Seth and Adrian and their work in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
King George's struggle with his stutter wasn't just about public speaking. It was about the crushing weight of perceived public scrutiny. To the king, each stumble echoed like a national embarrassment, but the truth is most people probably weren't analyzing each pause or syllable with the kind of intensity he imagined. This brings us to a concept in psychology known as the spotlight effect, coined by psychologists including Tom Gilovich.
The spotlight effect refers to our tendency to vastly overestimate how much others notice and judge imperfections in our appearance, decisions, and behavior. The miscalculation described by the spotlight effect plays out not just on the grand stages of history, but also in everyday life. It helps explain why a teenager mortified by a bad haircut might choose to skip prom, and why a successful consultant might lie awake fretting that their big presentation didn't have the intended impact because of a font mix-up on slide seven.
But how do we know that the way we think our imperfections are perceived most often doesn't mirror reality? In a series of ingenious experiments, Gilovich and his colleagues have demonstrated just how wrong we tend to be about how much attention others are paying to the very details we obsess over.
Tom Gilovich is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, and he joins me to talk about the origins of his research, how the spotlight effect plays out in real life, and what we can all learn about letting go of a little bit of self-consciousness.
Hi, Tom. Welcome back to the podcast.
Tom Gilovich: Oh, it's a pleasure, Katie.
Katy Milkman: I'm really excited to talk about the spotlight effect, and I always like to begin with a definition. Could you just describe to us what the spotlight effect is exactly?
Tom Gilovich: Sure. It's the widespread belief that the social spotlight shines more brightly on us than it actually does. Or stated differently, that people believe that other people notice, think about, and remember the things that they've done and said then is actually the case.
Katy Milkman: I love that. Could you give me an example of a setting where you've experienced the spotlight effect or where someone you know experienced the spotlight effect just to bring the vision to life?
Tom Gilovich: Sure. We had a holiday party, like many departments do, and this one involved karaoke, an activity of which I'm reluctant to participate. But the person who was organizing the event was very insistent, and of course, in my mind, it was a disaster. I think objectively it was a disaster. I remember it. I continue to be mortified.
But having done work on the spotlight effect, I think not too many people think much about it. And if they do, they're probably more charitable than I imagine them being just, "Oh, what a good sport he was with that voice getting up there."
Katy Milkman: I love that. That's a great example. And also, it sounds like your holiday parties are a lot more fun than mine, so I'm a little jealous. I'm also terrible at karaoke, by the way.
You've done some really fantastic research showing this empirically. Could you describe a favorite research study or two on the spotlight effect for us?
Tom Gilovich: Yeah. The one that received the most attention was a very simple study, where we had people show up in our laboratory and we told them, "Thank you for showing up. First thing we need you to do for this study is to put on this shirt over your clothes." We handed them a shirt with a big picture of the pop singer Barry Manilow.
Everyone agreed to wear it. None of the students looked terribly happy about doing so, but they were all willing, because this wasn't like putting up on a T-shirt of Bob Marley or Led Zeppelin that college students would assume other college students would think was cool. They were a little embarrassed about doing this.
And then we told them, "Great. You've got the shirt on. We need you to go down the hallway to another room, where other participants like yourself are gathered and another experimenter there will get you started." They walk down the hallway. They entered the room. There are other subjects there, busy filling out questionnaires.
The experimenter gestures for them to come and take a seat at the far end of the room, so they have to walk by everybody. Just as they're about to sit down in the chair, the experimenter says, "You know what, on second thought, I don't think this is going to work. Everyone has too much of a head start on you. Why don't you go back out in the hallway and talk to the other experimenter who will have something else for you to do?"
The participant then does this, and that first experimenter is out there and says, "This is a study of incidental memory, what people can remember that they weren't asked to remember. We're going to ask those people there, did they notice who was on your T-shirt, and do they remember who it was, and we want to compare actual incidental memory with people's intuitions about it. So our first question to you is, how many of the people in the room will be able to tell us who's on your T-shirt?"
The simple result is people overestimate by 100%. They think that about half the people in most of the studies we've done would be able to name who was on the T-shirt, when about a quarter are able to. That difference is what we call the spotlight effect.
Katy Milkman: I love that study. It's so interesting. One of the things that you emphasized was how embarrassing it is to wear a Barry Manilow T-shirt. So I wanted to ask, to what extent you think that is a critical component of this if they had been wearing a T-shirt that said something innocuous, like "I go to X college," would you still see an overestimation of how many other people remembered what their shirt was saying? Or is it the fact that it's embarrassing that creates this spotlight effect?
Tom Gilovich: We've done further research to look at both positive and negative things. The spotlight effect applies to your personal triumphs as well. We might be a little nonplussed to think about, oh, these great triumphs we've experienced, they may not be noticed, and they're quickly forgotten by other people as well.
We've done this in the context of studies where we have people engage in a group discussion, and after they've done so, we pull them out into separate cubicles and have them rank of the people in the group who made the most comments that ran the risk of offending someone, who had the greatest number of speech errors, negative things, like the Barry Manilow study, or positive things, who made the most comments that most advanced the discussion.
In both cases, whether it's positive or negative, people overestimate how highly they are ranked. They think the things they've done stand out in other people's minds more than they do.
We also did a Barry Manilow–equivalent study and found the same results when it was a positive T-shirt. But there was an interesting twist here that's consistent with your question, which is it's very easy to come up with a single image on a T-shirt that almost every college student would be embarrassed to wear. A little harder to come up with one that everyone would assume that their peers would say, "Wow, that's really cool."
So we couldn't do it. We had to give people a choice. These studies were done in the late '90s, and so at the time, if we offered Cornell students a choice between wearing a T-shirt with the likeness of Martin Luther King, Bob Marley, or Jerry Seinfeld, everyone was able to pick one of those that they felt just fine about, and we got the same result that they overestimated substantially the number of people they ran into who would know who was on their shirt.
Katy Milkman: That's really interesting and, I think, helps explain what's going on, which is going to be my next question. Could you talk a little bit about why it seems to be the case that we overestimate both for positive and negative experiences that we have, or positive or negative traits we have, or features of the shirt we're wearing …
Tom Gilovich: Yes.
Katy Milkman: … whether other people will notice?
Tom Gilovich: We are highly attuned to making good impressions on people, and therefore when we do something that is out of the ordinary, either positive or negative, we're super focused on it. We might appreciate that other people are less focused than we are, and so we adjust for that fact.
But as you've talked about in other episodes of your show, those kinds of adjustments tend to be insufficient. We don't adjust enough, and that insufficient adjustment creates this residual egocentrism really. That is a spotlight effect.
Katy Milkman: Are there ways that we can reduce the spotlight effect in our daily lives so that we make more accurate judgments of whether the zit on our nose will actually ensure that we can't get this job, or whether or not the embarrassing experience of standing up and engaging in karaoke at the holiday party will actually have a devastating impact on my reputation?
Tom Gilovich: Yeah. There's an exercise that clinicians who deal with people with great social anxiety do, which is to have them systematically say, "OK. What are you anxious about? Who are the people who you're worried about? OK. How many of these people are going to notice what you've just said or done?" And people recognize, "Oh, yeah, there's a lot of people I'm concerned about. Not all of them are going to notice."
How many will remember it a month from now? Of those people who remember it a month from now, how many are going to judge you harshly? And what you get is this shrinkage of all the thing there is to worry about. When you think about it that way, it becomes a little less anxiety-producing.
Katy Milkman: That's really interesting. In your studies, you're asking people how many people will remember, and they're getting the wrong answer, but it sounds like this exercise is positing that if you asked the question a few different ways to sort of force them to face the reality that this won't be a lasting impression, and that there are other things they're noticing that should weaken the degree to which they show the bias when answering and estimating how many people will notice something. Am I thinking about that right?
Tom Gilovich: You can also broaden it as well by getting them to reflect on their own thoughts about other people's behavior.
Katy Milkman: What was the last time you remembered a T-shirt someone was wearing for more than a day?
I do that a lot when I worry about wearing the same outfit to teach, by the way. I don't know if you have these kinds of … but I am like, "Oh, can I wear this again? I wore it two weeks ago to teach, and I really love this outfit, but will they remember?" And then I think to myself, "Do I remember what anyone was wearing two weeks ago on any day of the week? The dean giving the faculty presentation at our faculty meeting? No, I can't remember any of it." And then I'm like, "All right. It's OK. I can wear it again." Sometimes, that sort of exercise certainly works for me.
Tom Gilovich: Yes. We did a parallel series of studies on essentially that. That is, do people notice the variability in the things that we do? As we were running this set of studies, we referred to them as the Bad Hair Day Study, that we're often, "Oh no, my hair's not behaving itself today. This is going to be terrible. We feel terrible."
I don't think anyone really notices it. You are you. We don't notice the days where the hair is spectacularly well-behaved or the days where it's spectacularly not well-behaved. We have a sense of the essence of the person, and that's what stands out. The variability really doesn't.
Katy Milkman: I love that origin, and I love that message. Tom, I so appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today, and I really appreciate this fascinating work you've done on the spotlight effect. Thank you.
Tom Gilovich: It's always a pleasure to speak with you, Katy, and I love your podcast. Makes my workouts go much more smoothly and much more pleasurably.
Katy Milkman: Well, we love having you on it, and we're really grateful, so thank you very much.
Tom Gilovich is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. In addition to being a star behavioral science researcher, he's also the author of several terrific books for general audiences, including The Wisest One in the Room and How We Know What Isn't So. You can find links to Tom's books and to his research on the spotlight effect in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
How might the types of phenomena explored on Choiceology be impacting your personal finances and portfolio? Listen to the Financial Decoder podcast to find out. Check it out at schwab.com/FinancialDecoder, or just search for it in your podcast app.
What's fascinating about the spotlight effect is the breadth of its relevance. King George VI almost certainly imagined that every Brit who tuned in to listen to his Empire Day speech in 1940 would notice each falter in his diction and would lose all respect for his leadership if he stuttered noticeably, and he devoted massive time and energy to preparing.
Now, we'll never know what the consequences might have been if he hadn't pulled off a nearly flawless speech. But research by Tom Gilovich and colleagues suggests that even with a very real spotlight on him, the king almost certainly vastly overestimated the degree to which listeners cared specifically about the perfection of his diction.
Mostly when judging people, we don't pay terribly close attention to the details they imagine we'll observe carefully, like the T-shirt they're wearing, whether they stumble over the occasional word, whether their stock portfolio had a bad or good day last Tuesday, and whether their singing voice was great at the holiday karaoke party. We typically focus more on the gist of a person, their decisions and their performance, and less on those small details they incorrectly anticipate we'll pay close attention to.
Knowing this can be enormously empowering. Yes, it's OK to wear the same unremarkable outfit every two weeks, because, no, other people won't remember when you wore it last. Yes, it's OK to give a toast at your sister's wedding with a zit on your forehead, because most people won't notice. And even if they do, it's not what they'll remember. And yes, it's OK to buy an extended warranty on occasion that was a waste of money without forever being remembered by your family as that moron who fell for the scammy sales pitch.
Of course, occasionally, your gaffes will be remembered and become the butt of the forever retold family joke. It's probably those rare moments when something trivial is noticed that make you so terrified your flaw will draw the spotlight. But 99% of the time, you're overthinking it. And the key is actually to be kind, reliable, and do your best without obsessing over small imperfections.
Realizing that people aren't paying such close attention to your every move as you believe has another implication too. It suggests subtlety may not be the best policy when it comes to making sure the people who matter are aware of your wins. So even if you think everyone already knows you nailed your sales goal last quarter because your name appeared on the team leaderboard, your boss might not have been paying close attention. Mentioning it again when summarizing your case for promotion is a decent strategy. That is, don't take it for granted that people will notice the things that do matter.
You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app.
And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. Next time, I'll speak with University College London Professor Colin Fisher about his research on team synergy.
I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 11: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
