Embarrassment

Many symbolic interactionists argue that the separation of mind and body is false. When we are thinking, when we are conscious, when we are self-conscious, this activity of the self occurs in the brain. However complex our brain, it is still an organ of our bodies and is influenced by the way we treat our bodies. Not enough food or sleep, too much alcohol or food, and too much stress influence how we feel and think. Sometimes it is hard to concentrate and be rational. Frequently when we feel bad, we don’t care how we look – we don’t care how others see us. These examples illustrate the influence of the body on mental activity.

Sometimes we judge a task so important that we work late into the night even though we’d rather go to sleep – differed gratification. We will use ideas from symbolic interactionism to explain how our conscious self can influence our body responses. To do this, we will sociologically analyze the experience of embarrassment.

What happens to your body when you are embarrassed? You blush. What is it about embarrassing situations that cause the psychological response of blushing? Embarrassment is a social experience. It only occurs when others are present or when you think they might be present. Things you do in the privacy of you room might suddenly be very embarrassing if you became aware that you were being secretly observed. Thus the first consideration in our analysis is that embarrassment is a social event.

The second element is that something unexpected suddenly happens. Embarrassment results when our public self suddenly realizes that we are being seen in an unexpected and uncomplimentary way. Embarrassment may be socially defined as being caught out of role. When this happens we blush. In such situations we sometimes smile, laugh, or in some other way make light of the embarrassing thing that just happened. It is a way of establishing role distance between the self and the stupid, uncomplimentary, embarrassing event.

When we laugh at ourselves we are saying to others that this was funny or unimportant. It is not what I normally do. We are trying to restore ourselves to a normal situation of self-control. This analysis illustrates how the concept of role can be used to explain even a momentary experience. However, role has become one of the most important concepts in sociology for explaining many aspects of our relationships with others.