"They judged me"

The heaviest version of the audience isn't that they noticed or that they'll remember. It's that they came to a view. The person who saw you eating alone thought something about you. The one who heard the joke that didn't land decided something. And the thing they decided is roughly the thing you're afraid of, that you're odd, or sad, or not very good.

Kenneth Savitsky, Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich ran four studies in 2001 on this, published under the question of whether others judge us as harshly as we think. People who imagined committing a social blunder, or who actually failed at an intellectual task in front of others, or who were described to others in an embarrassing way, were asked how harshly they'd be judged, and the people doing the judging were asked what they thought. The actors expected worse than they got, across all four. The authors put it down partly to the actors being fixed on their own misfortune, and partly to their not thinking about all the other things an onlooker weighs, the situation, the pressure, the fact that anyone might have done the same.

The following year, the same three authors published a paper that reconciles this with something that looks like the opposite, which is that people are in fact quite quick to judge others by their behaviour, a tendency researchers call the correspondence bias. If observers are harsh, why do actors overestimate the harshness? Because, they found, observers soften when they can easily imagine being in the actor's shoes, and actors don't take that softening into account. They called it empathy neglect. You forget that the person watching you trip has tripped.

So the view they came to, if they came to one, is milder than yours. And it's worth adding that the view you imagine them holding is usually your own. The earlier book It wasn't about you covers what happens when you read a stranger's face as a verdict on you, and the short version is that the view is usually yours, projected outward and read back. The room didn't judge you. You judged you, in the room.