I read part of this book in somebody else’s reserved seat on an overbooked train; do train companies have any idea of the anxiety they cause when they suddenly announce that all seat reservations are suspended? As each stop triggered another mortifying conversation about seats, the book explained what was going on in our brains to make the situation feel so painful, why that matters so much to us and what we can learn from it.
Melissa Dahl is an American science journalist who has been writing about psychology for 10 years, and her book, about the very specific phenomenon of awkwardness, “began as an attempt to permanently banish the feeling from my life with science!” Like all good scientists, though, she has changed her opinion based on the evidence she collected. Dahl now seeks out and embraces awkwardness, and she thinks that we all should, too.
Readers of popular psychology will know by now that we social apes have evolved to find social acceptance critically important. Dean Burnett’s latest book, The Happy Brain, for example, explains why survival within the group has been more important in our evolution than survival in the environment; but Dahl goes further. Isolation “is damaging today too, even without the threat of hungry sabre-toothed tigers”, she writes. Loneliness “can increase a person’s risk of death by 26% – comparable to the health risk posed by obesity”.
Babies become self-conscious at the age of about two (scientists learned by sticking Post-it notes on their foreheads and showing them mirrors). And embarrassment – even watching other people embarrass themselves – seems to trigger some of the same processes in the brain as physical pain. We’d be forgiven for avoiding embarrassment at any cost – and some people, with social anxiety disorders, do. But Dahl argues that awkwardness can teach us all sorts of lessons.
She offers several convincing examples. Couples who drift into relationship markers such as marriage are less happy than those who discuss each step carefully, for instance: “Having the awkward conversation you’re dreading is often worthwhile.” When job adverts do not specifically state that pay is negotiable, women are far less likely than men to bite the bullet and negotiate a better salary. A 2014 campaign by the charity Scope found that “about two thirds of Britons surveyed said that they felt awkward or uncomfortable around disabled people”. One-fifth of 18 to 34-year-olds “said that they’d purposely avoided interacting with a disabled person because it made them feel so uncomfortable”. This avoidance is clearly a form of discrimination. And, as Dahl notes, some people do not have the privilege of avoiding awkward conversations about race, for example.
She writes about the “irreconcilable gap” between the version of us we think we project and the version that other people see, and describes how sometimes it is useful to have a critical friend to point this out. “When those two yous collide in a Skype video chat, revealing that you are having a weirder hair day than you thought, it’s disappointing. When these yous collide in the context of discussing something like racism, it’s sickening … But wouldn’t you rather know when there’s a little racism stuck in your teeth?” She talks to the comedian W Kamau Bell, whose good friend called him out on a joke he had made about Condoleezza Rice that seemed to her racist and sexist. Instead of reacting defensively, he “sort of sat in the awkwardness and leaned into it, and then eventually could very clearly hear that she was right …” If only more people could respond as he did.
Dahl and Bell agree about “the power of awkward conversations”. She takes up improv, appears in a show called Mortified, investigates a Reddit channel all about “cringe”, and pays a stranger for a hug. Through this, she learns about the psychological benefits of the bonding qualities of embarrassment; the difference between cognitive and compassionate empathy; and that some situations are too cringeworthy to bear.
Dahl is exceptionally good at describing emotions and the visceral physical sensations that often accompany them, and on the whole her personal anecdotes and her more scientific investigations are pertinent and penetrating. Cringeworthy offers several sensible pointers for readers, perhaps on trains, who would like to overcome awkwardness. But the most passionate advice is to be “grateful for this odd little emotion and the power it has to connect us … There will always be awkwardness, and the only way to keep it from isolating us is if we start cringing together.”
• Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness is published by Bantam. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
