Spotlight effect

Biological Parallel

Prey animals under threat exhibit heightened self-monitoring—a deer freezes when it hears a twig snap, assuming all predators focus on its movement. This hypervigilance about being observed evolved because the cost of underestimating attention (death) vastly exceeds overestimating it (wasted energy). The spotlight effect—believing others notice our appearance and behavior more than they do—reflects this ancestral predation pressure: better to assume the spotlight is always on you than to be caught off-guard once.