Being embarrassed is a terrible feeling.

The fear of getting embarrassed is one of the root causes of social anxiety.

It keeps a lot of people away from social interaction because they're so scared of being embarrassed.

I'm going to teach you 10 different strategies for recovering from embarrassment.

In a previous post, I talked about this idea of the expressive order, this fragile web of meanings that exists in every social encounter that has to do with who I claim to be, who you claim to be, what the meaning of the situation is, etc.

I talked about how we all have a moral commitment to maintaining the expressive order of the interaction. But inevitably, because we are imperfect creatures, the expressive order falls apart and people get embarrassed. Sometimes that's us, sometimes it's the other person, but embarrassment is an inevitable part of social life.

 

10 Mechanisms of Legitimation: Embarrassment Recovery Strategies

I want to talk about all the different ways in which we can recover from embarrassment. In fact, I have 10 different ways. The sociologist George McCall and J. L. Simmons call these strategies mechanisms of legitimation, that's because we're legitimating our role identity.

When we get embarrassed, suddenly the identity that we were claiming is no longer legitimate because we behaved in a way that was inconsistent with the identity we were trying to present for ourselves. So we're trying to present ourselves as a person who's together and intelligent and composed and so on, and then we do something embarrassing.

Our fly is open or we burp or we make a malapropism or we mispronounce a word, and suddenly we are out of face. We have revealed ourselves to be less than we were presenting ourselves to be, and we are embarrassed, so our identity is temporarily illegitimate.

These ways of recovering from embarrassment McCall and Simmons call mechanisms of legitimation because they're the way that we get our legitimacy back, the way we re-legitimate our identities so we can again claim to be the person who we previously claimed to be.

Here are the 10 mechanisms of legitimation, or ways to recover from embarrassment.

1. Build Up Credit

Sometimes we embarrass ourselves and we can just slough it off because we have build up a lot of credit with the people in this relationship about who we really are. We can just say,

"Oh, I guess I made a fool of myself there."

Then because of all the credit we've built up to be a certain sort of person, the embarrassment doesn't really take a very large toll on us and we can just return to be the person who we were before.

I can remember an example like this of my own. I was teaching and I presented an assignment but it was just totally the wrong assignment. I said the assignment was that students could turn in a full draft of their paper, and the assignment was really they can only turn in a two page version of the paper.

I said completely the wrong thing. I didn't know my own assignment, and it was really embarrassing. I pretended I was going to run out of the room in shame, but really I just kind of laughed it off. I said, "Oh, okay." Because of the credit I had built up with the students as a credible person and a teacher who really did know my material, it really had no significant effect on my identity with the students.

That's how building up credit in the past can help us just laugh off an embarrassment and move on. That's mechanism number one.

2. Selective Perception

This is when we don't have to pay attention to everything in our environment. There may be things in our environment that are potentially embarrassing if we were to attend to them, but we cannot attend to them.

Let's think of an example of selective perception. Imagine you're talking in a small group, there's three or four of you talking and you start to talk about a subject that's really, really sensitive. Let's say that one person in the group has recently broken up with their partner and you start to talk about that partner and what a nice person they are and how lovely they are and how you just saw them and they seemed so happy.

All the while, you are unaware that the other person had just broken up with them. Now they're cringing and they seem to really be suffering but you don't notice it. Later on your friend can say,

"Didn't you see? Oh, that was so embarrassing how you said those things about their boyfriend when they had just broken up. You said what a nice guy he was, that was so embarrassing. Didn't you see her cringing?"

And you could just say,

"Nope, I didn't see her cringing. I just thought she had indigestion."

So you can use selective perception as a way of just avoiding embarrassing evidence in an interaction. This isn't exactly a way of recovering as much as the way of not being embarrassed at all. You say,

"Well, I didn't see that."

3. Plea for Release From Normal Standards

This is when let's say you're at work and you have to give a presentation and you present terribly. The slides are all out of order and you fumble over your words and you're just really not at your best.

This embarrasses you. The way you relegitimate your identity is you plea for release from normal standards. You basically say something like,

"Oh, I'm really not at my best. My kids were sick and I was up all last night."

So you're asking to not be held to the normal standards. You’re saying, there's something extraordinary about this situation that accounts for my poor performance, and please release me from the normal standards and allow me to be judged by some lower standards because of these extenuating circumstances.

Out loud, you might say,

"Oh yeah, I'm just not at my best because my kids have been sick and I haven't been getting any sleep."

So we ask for release from normal standards, and in that way, we don't let this particular performance reflect on our enduring identity.

4. Selective Interpretation

This is related to the idea of selective perception, but it's slightly different. Selective interpretation might be something like, I'm giving a performance and the whole audience is booing. I finished playing my guitar and the whole is begins to boo. Then later on, I talked to my friends, they,

"Weren't you embarrassed? They were booing your performance so much."

I say,

"Oh. No, they weren't booing. They were saying, 'Bruce! Bruce!'"

This is selective interpretation of evidence.

Another example of selective interpretation might be that you give a presentation at work, and at the end you asked for any questions and there are no questions. There are no comments.

One interpretation of that might be that people didn't enjoy your presentation, that they weren't engaged, and that they just wanted you to leave the stage and move onto something else. That would be an embarrassing interpretation.

But you could selectively interpret that and say,

“I was so clear. My presentation was so clear that they had no questions at all. They were stunned into silence by the beauty and profundity of my presentation.”

That's selective interpretation.

5. Withdrawal From The Situation

This is basically when something happens and you get so embarrassed and humiliated that you run out of the room. That's it. You withdraw from the social situation.

There's no good way of getting out of the situation. It's just humiliating. And you just run. This is when you spill something on yourself or you do something incredibly embarrassing. You make a huge faux pas and there's no way out of it. It's just so humiliating to stay. You just run.

I'll give you an example of this one from my own life. One of the most embarrassing situations I can remember. I walked into a restaurant with a date, and this is a woman I was just dating for the first or second time. So I walk into this restaurant, we go up to the counter to get a table and I hear a voice behind me calling my name, "Hey, Bruce. Hey, Bruce."

It's my ex-girlfriend who I've just recently broken up with. She sees me there with another woman on a date, and we had been broken up, but still, it was an incredibly embarrassing situation to be in.

I didn't go over to see my ex-girlfriend. I just took the woman, my date by the arm. And we just walked out of the restaurant. I couldn't think of any other way of dealing with that situation. I was humiliated and embarrassed. We just left.

6. Role Switching

This is when you act in one particular role in a way that's embarrassing, and you pass it off by saying,

"Oh, no, I wasn't really in that role. I was in another role."

So an example of this might be something like you're in a meeting at work or at school and you're using a bunch of profanity. You're being really crude. You're being really informal. Someone says,

"Oh, Bruce, that's a totally inappropriate way to behave in this meeting. What are you doing?"

You could be really embarrassed, but you might say,

"Oh, have we started? I didn't know the meeting started. Oh, no, I was just talking to my friends. I didn't know the meeting had started."

That's a way of sort of saying, "Oh, I wasn't in my professional meeting role, I was in my friend role, and you can't attribute that other behavior, the profanity and the inappropriateness, to my professional role. You just have to attribute that to my informal friend role."

That's role switching.

7. Rationalization

Let's think of an example of rationalization. Imagine you're at a Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner with your family, and you start to talk about politics or abortion or gun control or some extremely divisive issue. You say a bunch of things that are completely different from the opinions of the people you're having your meal with, and you really embarrass yourself in some way by talking about these divisive issues and causing a big commotion at the holiday dinner.

Well, later on your spouse or your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your siblings say,

"What were you doing? How would you talk about abortion in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner? You embarrassed us so much by talking about those divisive subjects."

Rationalization would be,

"Well, these are the issues of the day. I have every right to talk about these things. I didn't do anything wrong. These issues are in the news and responsible citizens have to talk about these things. I can't help it if they're sensitive."

That's rationalization, making excuses. We do it all the time.

8. Scapegoating

This is when you blame somebody else. We embarrass ourselves and we blame somebody else. We all do this. I certainly know that I have.

Let's take the example that I just used about saying something embarrassing at Thanksgiving dinner. You talked about abortion. You talked about politics. You talked about gun control. You talked about Trump and you upset everybody at dinner. You can say,

"It wasn't my fault. I didn't bring it up. Somebody else started talking about abortion. All I did was respond. It wasn't my fault at all. It was your drunken uncle Henry who started talking about Trump at first, I just responded."

That's scapegoating, blaming somebody else for your behavior.

9. Pretend You Were Joking

You say or do something embarrassing, you're called on it, and you say,

"Oh no. No, I was just joking. The thing that I did that seemed embarrassing, you can't attribute that to my character because I was just joking."

Let's say you mispronounce a word or make a malapropism. A malapropism is when you say the wrong thing. You might say,

"Oh, I was in Rome and I saw the 16th chapel. It was so beautiful."

Well, it's called the Sistine Chapel, not the 16th chapel. And someone would say,

"The 16th chapel? What are you kidding me? Don't you know anything? It's the Sistine Chapel."

I say,

"Oh yeah, of course. I knew that. I was just seeing if he would catch me. I was just joking. I heard somebody else say the 16th chapel. And I just thought it was funny.”

10. Judge the Audience as Incompetent

Anytime we're embarrassed, it normally takes place in front of other people in front of an audience. And embarrassment means that we were decreased in their estimation, that we looked bad to them.

So one thing we can do to get out of an embarrassing situation and recover our own legitimacy is to basically say,

"That audience was not competent to evaluate me."

Let's say you give a musical performance. At the end of the musical performance, the people boo, or no one claps, or they're just totally indifferent and your performance appears to bomb. Well, you can say afterwards,

"What do they know? Those people wouldn't know good music if they heard it. I was casting pearls before swine."

There's this expression, to “cast pearls before swine,” that is to show pearls to a pig. A pig can't appreciate pearls, no matter how nice the pearls are. So one way of recovering from an embarrassing situation is to say,

"It was like casting pearls before swine. I gave a great performance. That audience wasn't capable of recognizing a great performance. And therefore, if they didn't recognize it, that's not a reflection on me. That's a reflection on their own incapability to recognize true greatness."

 

Summary

So there you have it.

10 different mechanisms of legitimation.

10 different ways that we can use to recover from an embarrassing situation.

Most of these are kind of intuitive, but now you have them all in your repertoire.

I think some of them are more graceful than others, but all of them might come in handy.

I hope you can use them to get yourselves out of those inevitable embarrassing situations.