To blurt out stupidity in society, to forget to zip up, to pour sauce on a table neighbor at a dinner party, to slip and fall during a dance … We all happened to burn with shame and feverishly think how to get out of a situation. What will help save face?
There is no person who has never found himself in this or that awkward situation. We have all been embarrassed or even burned with shame and frantically thinking how to get out of this. What will help us save face?
As you know, the need to belong to a social group is one of the basic human needs. To satisfy it, we try to constantly control our behavior, vigilantly monitoring how others react to us, what they think of us. Negative attitudes (real or perceived) damage our self-esteem. That is why we feel so painful, so acutely alienated, when we find ourselves in a stupid or awkward situation. This confirms the study of psychologist Joshua Clegg (Joshua Clegg) from John Jay College (New York).
The participants of the study were people of different ages, from students to very old people. They all talked about their experiences with awkward situations and their ways of coping with embarrassment. Then Clegg and his team summarized the results using special techniques and identified the most typical situations and types of responses.
Here are some of their findings.
Most often, we make mistakes in tense or uncertain (new to us) social situations. They can be unforeseen (for example, we accidentally dropped or spilled something) and expected, when we anticipate that some event is fraught with embarrassment (for example, many participants attributed meeting their partner’s parents to such events). In general, Clegg notes, the less clearly we imagine the coming event, the more we fear that we will have to go through awkward moments. For all that, if we feel happy, unpleasant predictions most often do not come true.
The feeling of awkwardness increases sharply if our oversight is noticed by those present and we find ourselves in the center of general attention. It seems to us that time stretches endlessly or has stopped altogether, we feel excitement and confusion, someone at such moments has a quickened heartbeat and sweaty palms. With the exception of narcissists who like to be the center of attention, everyone else at such moments painfully experiences this intense interest in their person.
The greater our confusion, the greater the chance that our attempts to extricate ourselves will be even more awkward. We can laugh unnaturally, speak too loudly, blush or stutter — in general, look rather unattractive. Meanwhile, people around us may themselves feel uncomfortable empathizing with us and imagining themselves in a similar situation. And it will seem to someone that our stupid behavior casts a shadow on them. For example, if we managed to break the owner’s favorite vase at a party, then the friend who brought us with him, it is quite possible that he will be considered equally clumsy.
What happens next? There are two options for getting out of an awkward situation: avoidance (I act as if nothing happened, or I try to leave the «scene» as soon as possible) and recognition of what happened. The first option is an obvious self-deception: no matter how much we convince ourselves that nothing unpleasant happened, the incident will still remain in the memory of the witnesses. Conversely, an effective solution is to face the truth. Humor works best here, as Clegg’s research has shown. If you openly and with a smile admit your mistake or bad luck, both you and those around you will feel relief. They may even admire your courage. It doesn’t even require sophisticated wit. A simple phrase like “Looks like today is not my day!” will work great too!
Alas, nothing will help us insure against embarrassment, but we can learn to get out of awkward situations with minimal losses, so that neither our image in the eyes of others, nor our own self-esteem is damaged.
About the Expert: Susan Kraus Witburn is a psychologist.