I want to talk about why we're often so scared of social interaction.

A lot of us are really scared about having a conversation.

We get anxious about giving a public speech, and we just have the feeling that the social world and social interaction and conversations are frightening and anxiety provoking.

The question is, why?

What exactly are we scared of?

Face

It seems like something really important is at stake in social interaction, and that it's somehow very risky and even dangerous. It feels like there's the potential to lose something really important, or to be harmed in some way. I actually don't think we're crazy for thinking that, I think that we're right.

Social interaction is inherently risky, and there is something frightening about it, and there is something important at stake in every interaction that we could potentially lose, and that's what I want to talk about today. The thing that we could potentially lose is our identity, or to use a more technical term, it's face.

We've all heard this term, to lose face or to save face. That's what I want to talk about today, this idea of face. What is it? What is it that we might be losing? Why are we so scared to lose it? Why is it that the idea of losing face causes us to be so anxious about social interactions, so afraid to have conversations or to get up in public in and speak?

Social interaction is risky and dangerous, in a way. It’s not physically dangerous because we're not going to be harmed physically, but we could be harmed emotionally and psychologically. It's risky because in any interaction we could be humiliated, we could be embarrassed, we could make fools of ourselves, we could be ashamed, and we all go into every interaction knowing this. Even if we can’t articulate exactly that feeling, there's a sense in the pit of our stomach that if we don't behave correctly or act in the right way, we could humiliate ourselves or make a fool of ourselves and it could all come crashing down. All of this is just our everyday way of thinking about the idea of losing face.

So what is face? What is it that we lose when we lose face? What is it that we save when we save face? Well, this idea of face was introduced by an American sociologist in the middle of the 20th century, a guy named Erving Goffman. I've talked about him before on the blog, and I've talked about him in other videos. So Erving Goffman says, "Face is the positive social value that we claim for ourselves by acting in a particular way." The positive social value. What he means by that is, to have face is to have an identity, dignity, pride, honor, self-esteem, or integrity. It's synonymous with all those things.

What Goffman is saying is that in order to have face, or to save face, we have to act in a particular way. It's not an attribute that we have forever, like our height or our hair color or our eye color. Face is something we have to maintain actively in every single interaction. That's one of the reasons why we sense intuitively that every interaction is risky, because even if yesterday we saved face and we preserved our identity, it doesn't mean that today we will. Even if we had an interaction this morning that went well, it doesn't mean the next day will go well. Any interaction can potentially go badly, and our face, the sense of our positive social value, could go bad at any time.

Let's think some more about this idea of face. When I think about Goffman who says, "It's the positive social value that we claim for ourselves by acting in a particular way," I'm reminded of an another example, and that's of Jesse Jackson, the politician and Reverend who often talked to children about pride and self-esteem. One of the exercises he does with them when he talks about self-esteem is he says with them, "I am somebody," or he says, "I am," and the crowd says, "Somebody."

Face is really the same thing, it's just the idea that I am somebody, I am somebody with pride, dignity, self-esteem, honor. Just think of face, in the simplest way, as this idea that I am somebody. But it's a claim that we make about ourselves, and so what it means is that by acting in a certain way in the social world, I'm making a claim consistently that I am somebody, and therefore I'm a person deserving of respect, and so on.

Saving and Losing Face

The interesting thing about face is that at any moment it can be lost, or it can be saved and maintained. We do that by acting in a particular way. So how do we maintain face? In maintaining face, we have a particular sense of our identity. With me it might be, I'm a college professor, and so to maintain my identity as a college professor I have to act in a certain way, I have to dress in a certain way, I have to speak in a certain way, I have to carry myself in a certain way, I have to respond to others in a certain way. All of those behaviors maintain my identity as a college professor. If at any point I act in a way that's inconsistent with that identity, I could lose face. Or if others treat me in a way that's inconsistent with that identity, I could lose faith.

Face is extremely important to us, we're emotionally attached to it. In one of my other posts I talk about identity and how every interaction is a performance, that as we go into the social world and we behave in a certain way in order to maintain an identity, we're doing that to maintain face. But the reason social interaction is risky is that any misstep or slight mistake means that we could act in a way that's inconsistent with our identity, or someone could act towards us in a way that's inconsistent with our identity, and suddenly we lose face. We're constantly aware of this potential danger.

Face and Social Anxiety

To have confidence means that we go into each social interaction behaving in a way as though we know we're not going to lose face, and social anxiety is really all about fearing that at any moment we could lose face.

There's an analogy I sometimes use to think about what it's like to maintain face, and I say it's like spinning plates on a stick. If you've ever seen someone balance a plate on a stick, they put the plate up on a stick, and the only way to keep those plates balanced on a stick is to spin them. If you stop spinning them, they fall down. This is the analogy I like to use for thinking about face or identity. If you stop actively maintaining your identity in an interaction, you will lose face.

You can never stop this maintenance of your own identity. Goffman says, again, "It's the positive sense of social value that we claim for ourselves by acting in a certain way." So some of us might think social interaction is exhausting, and some people avoid social interaction, like introverted people or people with social anxiety. They avoid social interaction because they have a sense that it's exhausting. Well, they're right, because to maintain face requires constant attention to how we're behaving.

Pride and Considerateness

I want to talk about another aspect of face. So the Erving Goffman says there's two aspects of it. On the one hand there's pride. We have to have enough self-respect, or pride, or dignity that we carry ourselves in a certain way. So when I want to maintain face as a college professor, I have to make sure I've taken a shower, I've shaved, I dress nicely, I carry myself in a certain way. All these things reflect my own pride, or dignity, or self-respect.

But the other aspect of face is considerateness. We have to be aware of other people's desire to save face. The thing that makes the social world scary is the idea that at any moment we could lose face, if we leave our fly unzipped, if we stumble over ourselves, if we say the wrong word, if we spill something on ourselves, we could lose face at any moment, and that's scary.

I think the thing that makes the social world less scary is the knowledge that everyone else is actually trying to help us save face. So when I first learned this I thought that this is a beautiful thing about the social world. On the one hand, it's risky because we could lose face at any moment. On the other hand, everyone else in the social world, if they have any pride and dignity and self-respect themselves, and if they are not a person who is without shame, then they will be trying to help us save face. This is because every one of us knows that the social world is risky. In order to minimize that risk, we actually cooperate with others to help them save face.

Let’s think of an example of this. Imagine that you're having a conversation with someone, and suddenly in the middle of the conversation, they spit on you. There's some saliva comes out of their mouth, and it lands right on your lapel. And on the one hand you may be thinking, “Oh, that is gross.” But if you're a person with good social skills, what do you do? You do nothing. You pretend that it didn't happen. You ignore it.

The same thing if you see a friend who’s just come back from lunch and they have a mustache, but you can see a crumb or a piece of food in their mustache. Again, what do you do? You don't say, "Ah, look at you, you have food in your mustache, you look like a fool." Well, someone who does that has no social skills. Someone who does has no shame or has no class. But anyone with social skill or class will be considerate, and so what they might they do? They might quietly take you aside and whisper, "Oh, you have a little food in your mustache," or they might give a little motion with their hands to give you a hint that you should wipe the food out of your mustache.

An Example of Saving Face

The best example I can think of is many years ago, the first President Bush, President George H.W. Bush, who was U.S. president after Ronald Reagan, once went to Japan on a state visit. He was invited to a state dinner, an official political dinner with hundreds of people in attendance, and he was seated up on a stage with the prime minister of Japan. If you're old enough you'll remember that, what did he do? He suddenly didn't look well, turned to the side, and he vomited in the lap of the prime minister of Japan.

This was an incredibly humiliating thing to do. It turned out he had taken some medication that didn't agree with him, and it made him sick. This would cause almost anyone to lose face. If you're the president of the United States, you have such an enormous obligation to maintain a certain dignified demeanor, especially when you're in public and at a state dinner, and especially in Japan where there's a great deal of attention towards face.

So he vomits in the lap of the prime minister of Japan, and it's an unbelievably humiliating thing to do. What does the prime minister of Japan do? He basically pretends that it didn't happen. In this case, they were concerned he was very sick, so the prime minister of Japan didn't literally do nothing, but later on there was a press conference where they were trying to show that the president was okay, and the prime minister of Japan didn't even want to talk about it. He wanted to act like it didn't happen. He minimized it, he didn't want to remember it, he didn't want to reflect on it, he didn't want to make a big deal out of it. This is cooperation in saving face at the very highest level.

This is for those of you who might be a little anxious about the social world and having conversations because you’re afraid that at any moment you could be humiliated and lose face. I want to reassure you that one of the facts about the social world is that if people have a basic level of considerateness, which the vast majority do, then you can count on them to help you save face. That is, it's in their interest to help prevent you from being humiliated, because they don't want to be humiliated.

The reason other people are willing to help us and be considerate is that they know that in any other time, it could be them who is about to be humiliated. It could be them with food in their mustache, it could be them vomiting on the prime minister of Japan, so they count on us to be considerate to them.

Face, the positive social value that we claim for ourselves, consists of these two obligations. On the one, it’s pride, that is carry yourself with self-respect. It's embarrassing to be around someone who humiliates themselves, it's embarrassing to be around someone who doesn't wash themselves, who doesn't brush their teeth, or doesn't dress appropriately, doesn't act appropriately, it embarrasses everyone, so it's one obligation we have is to carry ourselves with self-respect.

A second obligation is to be considerate of others, and not in the sense that we're always going to do other people favors. Consider it in this more fundamental way that we have to be attentive to their desire not to lose face. We have to actually cooperate with them to make sure they don't lose face. If they do end up doing something embarrassing, we either pretend we didn't notice, or we help them save face by minimizing what they've done, or telling them it's going to be okay, those sorts of things.

I think this is a greatly reassuring thing that yes, social interaction is risky, but on the other hand, the world is full of people helping us not get humiliated, because they don't want to get humiliated either.

The Key to Politeness

Those are some of the main points I want to make about face. I want to make two more points about face. I’ve talked about politeness, which is a basic element of dignified human interaction that also teaches us a lot about the inner workings of the social world. After Erving Goffman, other people built on this idea of face, and a couple of researchers called Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson came up with the theory of politeness. The beginning of their theory has to do with face.

But they went beyond what Erving Goffman said. As a reminder, Goffman just said, “Face is the positive social value we claim for ourselves,” it's the sense of dignity. Brown and Levinson said that face actually consists of two desires, or two wants.

The first of these is the desire to be liked and to be approved of. All of us, all the time, have the desire to be liked and approved of. We want other people to like us, we want other people to want what we want for us, and we want them to approve of us. This is the social approval that all of us can identify with, that when we go into a situation, one aspect of not losing face is to have other people accept us as we are and like us and approve of us. Brown and Levinson called this positive face, the desire to be liked and approved of.

There's another aspect of face that they called negative face, and that's the desire to be left alone. So ironically, in social interaction human beings have two fundamental desires, one to be liked and approved of, and two, to be left alone, to be able to go about our business without being interrupted, without being impeded in any way.

The interesting thing about politeness, which I'm only going to touch on briefly, is that anytime we threaten someone's desire to be liked and approved of, or we threaten their desire to be left alone, it can cause them to lose face. If I bump into someone on the street and I say, "Excuse me," I threatened their negative face, their desire to be left alone. If I ask them to do me a favor, I've threatened their desire to be left alone. So I have to do it politely, because I'm threatening their face.

If I tell someone to do something, if I say, "Give me that salt," or, "Lend me some money," or, "Help me wash my car," it  sounds rude because I'm violating their desire to be left alone without being polite. I threatened their face, and they lose face when I tell them to do something. If I'm in a situation and someone criticizes me, or if I criticize someone else, I threatened their desire to be liked and approved of, so that causes them to lose face.

What's interesting about face is that it's the key to politeness. Politeness is really a set of strategies for helping other people save face, and for doing things that cause people to lose face, but doing it in a way that maintains our dignity. We can't go through life without ever threatening someone's positive or negative face, or threatening our own positive or negative face. We have to ask people to do things, we have to sometimes criticize people. These are everyday actions which we have to do, but we have to do them without causing people to lose face or else no one will ever want to interact.

Politeness is the key to doing these ordinary things that threaten our desire to be left alone, or threaten our desire to be liked and approved of, but doing them in a way that doesn't cause people to lose face.

That's all I wanted to talk about today, this idea of face, the positive social value we claim for ourselves, and its central importance in social interaction.