PhronesisThe spotlight effect — the systematic overestimation of how much others notice one's appearance, behavior, and mistakes — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_SE in the landscape of unselfconscious presence. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as unselfconscious presence: the capacity to engage with activities, people, and environments without chronic monitoring of how one appears to others, absorbed in the activity rather than managing the impression it creates.
W_SE is maintained by the egocentrism mechanism: because one's own behavior is vivid and salient to oneself, individuals anchor on this salience and insufficiently adjust for the fact that others are primarily focused on their own concerns. Two subtypes are distinguished: appearance spotlight (overestimating the noticeability of physical appearance) and performance spotlight (believing ordinary social behaviors are being scrutinized).
The chronic attractor emerges when this cognitive bias becomes a stable self-monitoring orientation consuming significant attentional resources, generating performance anxiety in ordinary social settings, and driving avoidance behaviors that deepen the basin. Nine formal propositions characterize the egocentrism mechanism, the transparency illusion, the two subtypes, attentional cost, the performance irony effect, avoidance as basin deepener, social anxiety as amplifier, social media as chronic spotlight infrastructure, and return paths through attentional reorientation and behavioral experiments.