Your chest tightens, and your heart begins to race as you frantically look for a familiar face to sit with at Commons. Unfortunately for you, your friends have already finished their meals and are on their way out. Your thoughts fade as you feel yourself awkwardly shift in place with a plate in hand. You wonder if the rest of the Commons is already tracking how long you hesitate, reading your loneliness from the way your eyes scan seats in panic. The longer you stand, the hotter your face grows, and you are now certain that your discomfort is visible. Even tucked away in a far corner, you feel the overwhelming weight of judgment crush you. As far as you can tell, this one moment has branded you as an outcast, and everyone around you knows.
When we experience strong emotions or have a flood of intense internal reactions, we assume that our opinions and preferences are obvious to those around us, revealed in our actions and our words. This feeling of vulnerability is called the illusion of transparency, a cognitive bias that influences us to overestimate how much others can discern our internal states. Mandelbaum (2014) found that this illusion of transparency is often amplified among teens aged 9 to 17, a stage in development marked with self-consciousness and vulnerability to social evaluation. At the same time, research conducted by Savitsky, Gilovich, and Medvec (1998) demonstrates how inaccurate these assumptions can be. They found that it was much more difficult to identify subjects’ lies than how the subjects themselves had perceived.
Not having a friend to sit with at Commons is not a rare occurrence with our complex schedules and several commitments as students. As research proves, an intense emotion of anxiety in fear of judgment from our peers is also a universally shared experience. But at Andover, this phenomenon is amplified due to the socially dense, high-achieving community we live in. In theory, we are constantly observed by our faculty and peers alike, which serves to reinforce the idea that assessment is equally ceaseless. In addition to being in a high-proximity social network, our focus on our reputations plays a major role in the extent to which we care about how we are perceived by others. Surrounded by apparent evaluators, such heightened investment in our social image can be suffocating. We begin to avoid meals when we cannot find a friend to sit with, and we refrain from drawing attention to ourselves. We are pressured to conform to the conventions of our community, and we lose our identities; believing we are too visible makes us disappear.
However, the reality is that people pay much less attention to us than we think. In the same way we are invested in our own subjective experiences and perceived reputation, everyone else is equally absorbed in their problems to make intentional evaluations of us. While it is inevitable that our actions will have consequences and influence the way we are perceived, the subtle cues we think we give off are often too insignificant for people to pick up on. Just the slightest effort to hide our emotions can easily conceal them altogether. It is important to recognize that the anxiety we feel about being seen, judged, or exposed is far more apparent in our minds than it is in reality. Understanding this illusion gives us the freedom necessary to be ourselves without having to live under the constant fear that everyone is watching.
The heat in our faces, the weight of imagined judgment, the panic of having to sit alone; these experiences are far smaller than they seem. Most of the time, no one is deliberately tracking our hesitation and reading our body language. The fear of contempt that feels so visible exists only in our imagination, and we must remind ourselves that it is okay to be imperfect. The pressure to perform or to conform will diminish the moment we accept that while being “seen” is unavoidable, it is not nearly as judgmental as it feels. When we stop mistaking an illusion of surveillance for reality, we gain the freedom to explore our identities without the burden of evaluation.
