It makes the blusher suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, without being of the least service to either of them
wrote Charles Darwin about embarrassment.
Yet evolutionary psychologists today are finding that those feelings of excruciating embarrassment may be crucial for your wellbeing in the long term.
Embarrassment is most likely following the potential exposure of something private, rather than a mishap or a terrible mistake
One theory is that it’s a natural reaction to the fear of being “found out”. And your flustered expression may be a bodily reaction to the shock that your secret could be about to become public, even if it’s something to be celebrated.
Yet those situations feel very different from those really painful scenes where you wish the ground would just swallow you up – that time you accidentally called your teacher “mummy”, for instance. As Darwin pointed out, the feeling of embarrassment only increases our discomfort. But in reality, the opposite may be true.
One researcher thinks that similar reasoning may even explain why we feel embarrassed when we know people are looking at us (such as when we speak up in class), or even when we are praised; that flustered feeling is a way of showing that we want to avoid the unwanted attention. Do you sometimes feel this way?
And if you find yourself embarrassed at someone else’s misdeed – such as your father’s farting in public – it’s an unspoken signal that you recognise their mistake, and that you yourself are uncomfortable with breaking the rules.
Embarrassment may even be taken as a sign that you are a more altruistic person. In a subsequent experiment, participants were shown pictures of people with embarrassed expressions, and asked them a series of questions, such as: If this person were a fellow student, how likely is it that you would ask her to join a study group that you were a part of? People who looked a little flustered were more likely to be included than those who looked cool and calm.
If that knowledge still doesn’t help to take the sting out of your humiliation, you could remember that you are probably suffering from the “spotlight” effect: we always over-estimate the amount of attention we are getting, and this is particularly true when we feel embarrassed.
To put it bluntly, we are not nearly as interesting as we would like to think we are. That is, people are not thinking of you as much as you think they are!
As it is, you should compare those moments of acute embarrassment to the fever that comes with cold – temporarily uncomfortable, but necessary for our long-term wellbeing.
We really don’t want to have these feelings, and we go out of our way to suppress and regulate them. Although, embarrassment is unpleasant, it is serving a useful purpose.
Remember this the next time you make a grammatical error in speech, and are laughed at. It is not the end of the world, it is a part of life.
