“You need an audience to feel embarrassed,” says Frieder Paulus, a psychologist at the Lübeck University in Germany. The emotion is social: It tells us when we have violated a social norm and makes us feel bad for doing so.
We have to actually know what these norms are to know we’ve violated them. Tripping is more or less universally embarrassing; we all know humans are meant to be upright creatures. But years ago, Paulus and his lab director Sören Krach attended a presentation by someone who bragged unabashedly about his work, clearly unaware of what a fool he looked like in front of his peers, Melissa Dahl writes in her new book Cringeworthy. The two realized that watching their colleague humiliate himself was painful, even though they knew they had done nothing themselves that was outside of social norms. They decided to explore this phenomenon further in their lab.[...]
It’s not clear why we have the capacity to cringe for others. Reflecting on the question in 2018, Paulus said there may not be a reason for it. We feel others’ embarrassment only because we are empathetic. It’s necessary for us to imagine how someone else thinks and feels because it determines how we treat others and cooperate with one another. Feeling second-hand embarrassment is probably just a byproduct of amore important trait, much like how the (useless) belly button is a relic of the (absolutely essential) umbilical cord.
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