When I write knowing someone will read it, something changes. Having readers forces me to think harder about what I’m trying to say. My arguments become sharper and my examples clearer.
Yet I notice the temptation to gravitate toward topics I know will get engagement. Should I explore the philosophy of boredom or write about productivity hacks? I know what kind of content tends to perform better on the internet.
That’s the audience effect at play. The mere presence of others fundamentally changes what we choose to do and who we choose to be, and we become different people when we know we’re being watched.
When Your Brain Senses an Audience
Our brains evolved to care deeply about social status. When we sense we’re being observed, our neural networks shift into “performance mode,” prioritizing social approval over personal preferences. The regions associated with intrinsic motivation quiet down while areas processing social feedback light up.
This neurological shift explains why an audience changes our decision-making. We start choosing safer options, more impressive goals, more socially acceptable paths.
The question shifts from “What interests me?” to “What will make me look good?” and our external signals start overriding our internal preferences. Once you know about the audience effect, you’ll notice how it plays out everywhere:
- Creative work: an audience can provide the focus needed to transform ideas into compelling work, but it can also pull us toward audience-pleasing mediocrity instead of genuine creativity.
- Social media: the audience effect makes us curate different versions of ourselves for different platforms (professional on LinkedIn, casual on Instagram, witty on Substack) which can help us connect but can also fragment our sense of self.
- Career decisions: worrying about our audience, even if that audience is just your parents, can make you choose prestigious paths that look impressive from the outside but feel hollow from within.
- Relationships: because of the audience effect, we might unconsciously adjust our personality or behave in ways we think are expected from us, which helps us fit in but can leave us wondering who we really are.
What makes the audience effect particularly tricky is the associated feedback loop. As we get positive reinforcement for audience-oriented choices, our preferences gradually shift to match what gets rewarded.
We lose track of what we originally cared about, replacing it with whatever generates the strongest reaction. Over time, we forget what we wanted before we started performing for others.
Making the Audience Effect Work for You
You can’t eliminate the influence of having an audience, and you actually wouldn’t want to. After all, an audience can provide focus, energy, and clarity that can make our work better. What you want is to make the audience effect conscious and intentional.
1. Conscious audience selection. Not all audiences are worth performing for. Instead of optimizing for the broadest possible appeal, choose whose opinions actually matter. Stay aware of your own thoughts and write for the five people whose judgment you respect rather than the five thousand who might click “like.”
2. The sandboxed approach. Keep both audience-aware and audience-free creative spaces. Share your progress, but also work on projects no one will see. You can also consider a periodic “audience detox” where you deliberately create without any external validation in mind.
3. Strategic audience leverage. Use the audience effect as a tool. Want to learn something new? Run a tiny experiment in public. Curious about a topic? Start a study group. The key is to choose challenges that stretch you toward your own ambitions rather than toward what you think will impress others.
Next time you’re making a decision – whether that’s what to write, what to share, what career move to make – pause and ask: “Am I doing this because I want to, or because I think others want me to?”
When you recognize the audience effect, you get your agency back. That’s why there’s nothing wrong with choosing the audience-pleasing option sometimes as long as you’re making that choice consciously. You can then leverage the increased focus, energy, and clarity without falling prey to the drawbacks of the audience effect.