"It was obviously aimed at me"

Start with the belief that arrives as a fact. The short email was aimed at you. The quiet was directed at you. It wasn't a guess. It was obvious.

Allan Fenigstein, in 1984, ran three studies with over two hundred students that measured what he called the self-as-target bias. In the first, students waiting for their exam results were told that the teacher had singled out one paper as especially good, or especially bad. Asked whose it was likely to be, they were more likely to think it was theirs than a classmate's, whichever way the paper had been singled out. In the second, students in a group overestimated the chance that they, rather than someone else in the group, had been picked for a demonstration, whether the demonstration was described as pleasant or unpleasant. In the third, students who scored high on public self-consciousness, meaning they think a lot about how they appear to others, were more likely to read hypothetical social situations as being relevant to or aimed at themselves.

Those were students and the situations were small. But the pattern is the one I'd ask you to hold. People overestimate the chance that they're the target of whatever is happening around them, in both directions, good and bad, and the people who do it most are the ones most aware of being seen.

Why would that be? I think the answer is position, and this is my reading rather than Fenigstein's. You are, necessarily, at the centre of your own day. Every event in it happens to you or near you, and you're the one constant across all of them. So when something happens near you, a look, a tone, a silence, you're already standing where the target would be, and it takes no work at all to conclude that the target is you. It would take work to conclude otherwise. You'd have to construct another centre, with another person's day in it, and nobody does that by reflex.

A car alarm going off in a street is a fair comparison for two sentences. Everyone in the street looks at their own car, and the alarm was aimed at none of them.

So when the reading arrives as obvious, that's what obvious feels like from the centre. It isn't evidence. It's the view from where you're standing, and everybody in the street is standing in the same place.