EXAMINING THE FOCUSING ILLUSION AS A COGNITIVE MECHANISM UNDERLYING CATASTROPHIC PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL BLUNDERS IN SOCIALLY ANXIOUS INDIVIDUALS

The current study examined whether high socially anxious individuals overestimate the cost of committing social blunders due to the mental heuristic known as the focusing illusion, specifically that they may focus on salient blunder-related information without considering other inconspicuous blunder-unrelated information. Two hundred and fifty-nine undergraduate participants across the social anxiety spectrum imagined and estimated costs associated with committing hypothetical blunders. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: (1) No defocusing; (2) indirect defocusing; (3) direct defocusing; and (4) indirect plus direct defocusing. Indirect defocusing involved participants generating factors that they thought would influence how they would be judged such that they could potentially consider the impact of blunder-unrelated information on others' judgments. Direct defocusing involved participants being directly provided with blunder-unrelated information as part of the hypothetical blunder descriptions. Results revealed that direct defocusing lowered perceived costs across social anxiety levels, whereas indirect defocusing did not induce participants to consider blunder-unrelated information and did not reduce perceived costs. Novel treatment approaches to reduce cost estimates of blunders for social anxiety disorder are discussed.