Rung 3 · Graded exposure
Wear the thing you save for safe company
Wear or carry the thing you like but keep for people who already know you — the colour, the hat, the band shirt — somewhere ordinary, for a whole day.
Your attempts
Nothing is recorded against this rung. The dread you feel next time will be a guess, and you will have nothing to check it against.
Why this one
You are carrying a estimate of how much of you other people register, and it is too high. This rung is a cheap way to collect the real number, on a day where the only thing at stake is a garment.
What it buys — Every rung above this assumes a room full of people studying you. This is where you find out how few of them are.
Students made to wear an embarrassing T-shirt guessed about half the room would notice; roughly a quarter did. Observers register a fraction of what the wearer feels is broadcast.
What it cannot show — Undergraduates in staged situations — an embarrassing t-shirt, a group discussion. It measures how much observers actually noticed, not how much anybody should worry.
Here — T-shirts in a lecture room, not presence in a bar. We extend the direction of the error, not the numbers.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under, on ordinary days rather than ones where you were already feeling brave.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 4 — A sentence to a stranger, dailySource
Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky (2000). The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2).
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 04 of that lesson.