This post is the text of a video essay (posted on YouTube here):

The spotlight and the shadow

Me banging the table about the fact that we impact others and others impact us may sound like an entry straight from of the “You Don’t Say?” logs by Captain Obvious of the HMS Already Knew That.

But when I reflect on my own experience, I can recognize two parts of me that have gradually been integrating over the course of my life.

One part is deluded by the “spotlight effect”, which is the cognitive bias that makes us overestimate how much others notice and pay attention to us.  This part can show up overly cautious and self-monitoring, grandiosely overestimating it’s impact and over-personalizing others’ behavior.  This part can also attract us to overly simplistic affirmations to correct the spotlight effect, such as the quote, “when I turned 20 I worried about what others thought of me, when I turned 40 I didn’t care what others thought of me, and when I turned 60 I realized that no one was thinking of me at all.”

But I’ve also noticed another part that underestimates my significance, feels that hardly anything is personal, and thinks that the trajectory of other’s lives are unaffected by my own.  This part tends to be surprised when others share how I’ve impacted them in both positive and negative ways as a result of fairly small interactions, or when people reveal that they remember something about me or still show some interest in me after decades of being out of contact.  I don’t know if this tendency has been named as a known cognitive bias that’s the opposite of the spotlight effect.  I’ll call it “the shadow effect” for now, because it’s clear to me from my own introspection and from work with clients, that it exists.

The spotlight effect and the shadow effect contradict each other and don’t seem to become active at the same time.  Instead, I’ve observed that we alternate between overestimating and underestimating our personal impact on others at different times, depending on our current interior and external contexts.

Human development and circular causality

It’s possible that a major task of human development is to integrate those two parts of ourselves that overestimate and underestimate how personally significant we are to others.  Or in other words, to better understand the circular causality that we’re involved in from moment to moment.

When we’re children, our experience of our own power and significance to others fluctuates in ways that are confusing for a developing psyche; ways that are related to the evolution of our family system, our own physical and psychological growth, and our increasing integration into society.

When we’re a newborn infant, we experience mainly our primary caregiver(s), predominantly our mother in most cases.  Ideally, our basic physical and emotional needs are quickly addressed.  We’re fed, cleaned, held, burped, and cradled, over and over again as we grow, month after month.

As we become toddlers, we experience jarring new boundaries.  We realize we’re not allowed to do everything – most things, actually.  Our allowed choices increase more slowly than our increasing awareness of all the possible options we can imagine.  We have to swallow more and more bitter pills that we’re “not the center of the universe”, while continue to receive our “I’m the most important thing to my parents” sweet pills.  One minute we skin our knee and cry and are immediately soothed, and the next minute we’re in time out because we bothered an adult or other child with our developmental anarchist impulses.  One minute we see pure love and adoration toward us in our parents’ eyes, and later that day we’re in a restaurant full of loud and huge humans who hardly notice us.  We’re still almost totally unaware of the daunting indifference that the other eight billion residents of Earth feel toward us.  But in the unconscious depths of our young psyches we’re asking ourselves: Are we important or not?  Are we powerful or not?  Are we loved or not?  The more our little minds can comprehend, the more nuance and variables modify the fluid verdicts regarding our significance, as clarity and confusion compete within us.

As we age into childhood and then adolescence, we gain in our personal influence and power at the same time our eyes are forcibly opened to our relative smallness in a world whose vastness we increasingly grasp.  Even by the time we’re young adults, I don’t think we’ve at all fully reconciled the yin and yang of our potential and our limitations, of our impotence and our impact on others, and of how personal and how impersonal our exchanges are in that multi-billion human tribe we hear about.

And that convoluted scenario I’ve just depicted is the healthy one which doesn’t take into account the additional confusion that can result from traumatic family and societal experiences of neglect, abuse, and emotional attachment injuries.  How trauma experiences can distort our sense of reciprocal impact and boundaries and thus our circular causality is a fairly vast sub-topic I hope to speak on later.

At mid-life, I still feel my way into fluid speculations about the degree to which others’ behavior toward me is personal – the result of some impact I’ve had on them – and also the degree to which my behavior toward them is personal and results from their impact on me.

Evolution and circular causality

There could be evolutionary reasons that we’re capable of compartmentalizing both an over-personalized sense of significance, and an overly-separate denial of our influence.

Not all human beings in history have had the same degree of impact or influence on the contemporaneous collective.  Emperors, kings, high priests, and generals were known to, and affected, far more people than the slaves, peasants, acolytes, and foot soldiers who they presided over and made decisions for.  If you see someone famous on the street, your reaction to them might be based on actual behavioral data you have about them, whereas they’re more likely to react uniformly to the fans and critics they encounter.  The city mayor and the fortune 100 CEO will experience more personalized behavior on average in their day to day lives than will their residents and factory workers, because the impact of the words and actions in those relationships flows mostly in one direction, creating reputational and parasocial asymmetry.

Perhaps the range of our influence in the time and place that we’re inserted into human history can vary so much depending on our cultural and social contexts, that our species needed to evolve psychological architecture that can match the potential gamut of our social power and visibility that we can personally have on others across different contexts and periods of our individual lives.  But any perceptual spectrum like this introduces the possibility of error.  Just like the ability to have variable and context-dependent fear can lead us to be more or less afraid than reality warrants in a given situation, our ability to have a variable and context-dependent sense of our influence can lead us to both overestimate and underestimate how personal others’ behavior toward us is.  All of our perceptual faculties are imperfect tools that exist because they led our species toward survival more than they led us toward danger in a universe too complex to fully grasp.

But when we’re aware that there’s always a little more reality to be perceived using our conscious and focused curiosity, we can find more truth despite our imperfect psychobiological capacities.  We can improve our acumen in comprehending the nature and extent of our circular causality as we traverse our modern and specific interconnected environments.