Stop, you're embarrassing me

The Oxford English Dictionary defines embarrass as an act or emotion that causes a person ‘to feel awkward or self-conscious or ashamed’. It can be personal, as when attention is drawn to something private or to one’s personal flaws. It can be professional, as when evidence is disregarded or when an official course of action is abandoned.

Embarrassment is usually accompanied by some physiologically-expressed features such as blushing, sweating, nervousness, fidgeting, even stammering. In circumstances where social etiquette is breached, nervous laughter is often a response, which can easily be misunderstood or misinterpreted.

The physiological repertoire that accompanies the emotion of embarrassment is strings of biochemistries the pathways for which are reasonably well understood. The biology of blushing, for example, is known to involve particular chemicals flowing towards particular destinations. We also know which biochemical producing cells are involved.

Sweating is well understood too. Nervousness is less well understood. Stammering and fidgeting are behavioural sequences linked in part to the nervous system and brain. How the whole system coordinates to produce the emotion of embarrassment in response to particular cues has not yet been fully documented.

Still, it is just a matter of time before an emotion like embarrassment can be described in scientific detail. Like everything else, the emotional characteristics associated with embarrassment are distributed unevenly in any population. You and I know individuals who have so much of it they avoid any social situation that may leave them embarrassed.

They are the lets-creep-into-the-nearest-hole personalities.

Then there are the individuals who lack the self-awareness necessary to feel embarrassed and indeed lack the emotional biochemistry altogether. We sometimes use the word gauche to describe such a person, someone who does not get embarrassed in the least even when they make utter fools of themselves.

They are the lets-make-a-fool-of-myself-without-even-knowing-it personalities.

It typically is the same kind of gauche person who has no difficulty or qualms about embarrassing others and subjecting them to public ridicule and humiliation. There are some pathological types who thrive on it and deliberately manipulate situations to achieve that end, by failing to greet in public or turning their backs on you.

You and I know of personalities who would use private information and, with intended maliciousness, carefully release it in a calibrated manner to perversely achieve the right measure of public humiliation for someone they dislike, or to seek revenge for a past slight committed. Social ostracism usually follows the life of such a person.

I talk about extremes of personalities to pose the question as to why the biochemistry of embarrassment has been kept in the gene pool of humanity. It is as the English actor and playright Alan Bennett once wrote, ‘embarrassment is what keeps us in our place.’ (Dinner at Noon BBC television, 1988). It is one of the many emotions that make us strive to live up to the norms of the group.

You see, as we well know, humanity both compete and cooperate. We fight over scarce resources that sometimes bring out the best in us but, more typically, bring out the worst, to the point of mutual and self destruction.

We have achieved our finest when we cooperate especially on the basis of a firm morality, lest we forget that the holocaust and episodes of genocide were acts of evil high-level cooperation. War making is (male) human cooperation too.

The emotion of embarrassment makes cooperation possible. The emotion of altruism – feeling for someone else – makes cooperation with justice possible. Individuals who possess the biochemistry of embarrassment show a concern for how others perceive them which can act as a brake on their behaviour, enhancing conformity to group norms.

In the struggle for survival therefore, the emotion of embarrassment became important, even critical, to the survival of the group. Cooperation is necessary for hunting. It is necessary for having successful large-scale projects like agriculture.

Of course, embarrassment can be used to separate individuals and sustain distinction of hierarchy. With reference to the English class system Alan Bennet said that embarrassment’s real solvent ‘is a proper measure of self-esteem- a kind of unselfconsciousness. Some people are at ease with themselves, so the world is at ease with them. My parents thought that this kind of ease was produced by education … they didn’t see that what disqualified them was temperament – just as, though educated up to the hilt, it disqualifies me.’