Illusion of Transparency

The illusion of transparency is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which one's own internal mental states, such as emotions, thoughts or intentions, are accurately perceived and understood by other people. The psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Husted Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky documented the effect in a series of studies published in 1998, including experiments in which participants overestimated how well observers could detect that they were lying or how noticeable their nervousness was during a public performance. The effect is related to the broader class of egocentric biases in social perception, in which a person's privileged access to their own internal experience leads them to overestimate how obvious that experience is to outside observers.