The great thing about reading so many psychology books, as I must, is that whenever you're faced with one of life's challenges, you can call to mind some helpful piece of wisdom. Let's say, hypothetically, that you're crossing the road one autumn morning - perhaps you work for a newspaper, in London - when some malicious halfwit of a taxi driver skids round the corner, douses you with puddle-water, damn near hits you, then speeds off. You don't need to become consumed with rage, swear loudly, and demand to know if he was trying to kill you. "How interesting!" you can superciliously observe instead. "If I were to get angry, that would be a classic example of 'egocentricity bias' - the near-universal human error whereby we think of ourselves as the cause and target of others' actions far more than is actually the case. That driver wasn't trying to soak me, or kill me. Maybe it wasn't his fault he didn't see me. And even if he is a generally careless driver, which would be bad, it would be absurd to respond as if he had it in for me personally."
Like I said, this is hypothetical. Personally, I go for the rage and swearing every time. But I shouldn't: study after study shows that we're terrible at guessing what's really going on in other people's heads, and we habitually assume we figure far more prominently than we do. If you're worried that your boss is displeased with your work, that your child does things just to spite you, or that your so-called friends are sneering at you behind your back, be reassured. It's not that these people are thinking wonderful thoughts about you - they're just not thinking about you at all. (Partly, no doubt, because they're too busy worrying about what others are thinking about them.)
The psychologist Thomas Gilovich once made students walk into college classrooms wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt, after he'd already conducted a survey that showed they would find this particularly embarrassing. On average, the T-shirt-wearers estimated that 46% of the other students noticed their horrific clothing choice; in reality, only 23% did. Anyone who's ever been a wallflower at a party knows this "social spotlight effect" well: you stick out like a sore thumb, except that, actually, you don't. Gilovich speculates that evolution might have given us this acute self-consciousness because being aware of what others thought of us was once a life-and-death matter; it isn't any more, but our emotions haven't caught up.
An interesting implication of all this is that egocentricity isn't the sole preserve of the kind of people we generally call egocentric - people who think they're fantastic. Even if you're convinced that everyone hates you, you're still giving yourself far too prominent a role in the mental lives of others. From one perspective, this universal self-absorption is rather bleak, but from another it's freeing. Either way, it seems to be universally true, so you might as well embrace it.
I just feel a bit sorry for Barry Manilow. Only a bit, though; I've got my own problems to be worrying about.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
