The Scout Mindset

This is another way in which our intuition about costs and benefits is skewed—we overestimate the importance of how we come across to other people. Social costs like looking weird or making a fool out of ourselves feel a lot more significant than they actually are. In reality, other people aren’t thinking about you nearly as much as you intuitively think they are, and their opinions of you don’t have nearly as much impact on your life as it feels like they do.