The Social Spotlight Increases Blindness to Change Blindness

Abstract

The results of research on change blindness and the spotlight effect suggest that (a) others are unlikely to notice changes in our appearance and (b) we are likely to overestimate the extent to which others notice changes in our appearance. However, little research has directly addressed the latter possibility. In Study 1, target persons overestimated the extent to which observers noticed a change in their sweatshirt. In Study 2, observers who followed the target persons throughout the study overestimated the extent to which other observers noticed the change in the target persons' sweatshirt, but target persons' overestimations were significantly higher. The results suggest that the spotlight effect increases blindness to change blindness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of Study 1 was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL, May 2007, and Study 2 at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Chicago, IL, May 2008.

I thank Dan Levin, Leonard Newman, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on this article. I also thank Emily Bodenham, Ashley Culler, Laura Gruber, Melanie Riedel, and Kelly Thornton for their assistance with the collection, coding, and entry of data.

Notes

¹Consistent with the findings of Levin et al. (2002), the results of Study 1 showed that CBB occurs even when it should be obvious that no perceptual transient will signal the change. In other words, it does not seem to be the case the CBB occurs because participants believe that changes call attention to themselves via a perceptual transient. In Study 1, the change from the gray to the AE sweatshirt occurred while the target person was away from the observers, and observers' prechange and postchange views were separated by more than 1 min.

²It is interesting that observers in both studies exhibited such a high degree of change blindness even though the description of the memory game implied that people might have trouble noticing when something is missing or has changed.

³Although the target persons strongly overestimated the extent to which the other participants noticed the change to their appearance, it is noteworthy that this occurred in the context of a social situation in which the uninformed observers were busy attending to the memory game they thought they were about to play. Perhaps target persons' estimates would be more accurate in a situation where the observers are less distracted. Gilovich et al. (2002) found that videogame players overestimated the extent to which fellow players (i.e., busy observers), but not unbusy observers, noticed the variability in their game-to-game performance. Although the players thought the variability in their performance would be noticed equally by busy and unbusy observers, they were much more accurate at estimating the unbusy observers' responses. Perhaps the target persons in the present research would have been more accurate if the uninformed observers were not as busy paying attention to the memory game, making the observers more likely to notice the change that occurred in the target person's appearance. On the other hand, research on change blindness suggests that observers fail to notice dramatic changes in a person's appearance even when they are paying attention to the person (e.g., Levin & Simons, 1997; Simons, Chabris, Schnur, & Levin, 2002; Simons & Levin, 1998).