Embarrassment, what is it good for?
I was about five minutes into a lovely chat with a man backstage at an event recently, when I casually asked him: “So what do you do then?” As he humbly explained that he tends to do things “on stage and stuff”, I suddenly realised, to my horror, that I was talking to a very famous actor. But no sooner had I started to turn scarlet and to say things like, “Oh, I knew I recognised you,” (a lie) than the actor had lost his grip on the mini-cake he was trying to lift to his mouth, launching it into the air. It smooshed on to the floor, iced side down. “Oh God,” he muttered.
After I fetched him another one, I started telling him about the many other embarrassing things that had happened to me that day (there had been several). As we exchanged anecdotes, I began to notice a peculiar phenomenon: none of the things we were embarrassed about had caused suffering to anyone else. Quite the opposite, in fact. This actor probably quite enjoyed speaking to someone who, for once, didn’t know who he was; I was certainly relieved about having the attention snatched away from me in such theatrical fashion by an uncooperative mini-cake.
Researchers have suggested that embarrassment is akin to a “non-verbal apology and appeasement gesture”. But this feels a bit off to me. Having searched the internet for the most common embarrassing moments — undone flies; waving back at someone who wasn’t actually waving at you; trying to get past someone while you both repeatedly move in the same direction; a skirt riding up to reveal underwear — none of them are really things that would need either an apology or any kind of “appeasement”.
That is not to say that the emotional pain of embarrassment is not just as intense as that we experience when we have genuinely wronged someone. Although the feeling may be more superficial, it is often more acute, and enduring. So strong is the power of embarrassment, in fact, that it can make us behave quite irrationally — even immorally: as researchers note, the fear of feeling awkward can be strong enough to stop us from intervening in emergency situations, or from getting vital health checks.
Ultimately, embarrassment is simply the unpleasant feeling that we have done something to harm the image we imagine others have of us. What could be the purpose, then, or indeed the evolutionary explanation, for such irrational, excruciating discomfort?
This is an area Charles Darwin himself pondered. “Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions,” he wrote in 1872 in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin seemed unable, though, to provide any real explanation for it: “It makes the blusher to suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, without being of the least service to either of them.”
Darwin wrote that the “essential element” of the various feelings that trigger blushing is “self-attention”, explaining that “it is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face”. And yet while he talked a lot about shame, Darwin never talked about “embarrassment”.
The word itself entered the vocabulary in the late 17th century, and yet it appears to have become far more prevalent in modern times, while “shame” has moved in the opposite direction. In 1800, the word “shameful” appeared eight times more often in English-language literature than the word “embarrassing”, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer; in 2022, “embarrassing” turned up twice as often.
It is perhaps not surprising, given the way in which western societies have moved from collectivist cultures towards more individualistic, secular ones, that we have replaced shame with embarrassment. As our identities have become less shaped by the roles given to us by society, and more connected to our “personal brand”, we seem to have become more and more concerned about the things that damage that brand rather than those that hurt others.
Shame is often maligned as a negative, useless emotion. It is not. Feeling shame for things that are beyond our control might not be helpful, but feeling it for things that we have done wrong means that we are taking accountability. I was struck, in late 2022, by the lack of responsibility taken by the now convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. He kept talking about how “embarrassed” he was at having lost $8bn of other people’s money. He never mentioned shame.
Embarrassing moments can humanise us and can bond us to one another. Studies have even shown that those who display signs of it tend to be more trusted than those who don’t. It may not carry much moral heft but all of us, from awkward teenagers to celebrated thespians, have been there. I wouldn’t want to shame anyone for that.