Accidentally liking an old photo on someone’s social media feed, revealing yourself to be a creepy stalker. Saying goodbye to someone, only to discover that you’re both walking in the same direction. Waving hello to someone who was definitely waving to a person behind you. Assuming the cashier at the sandwich shop asked for your name because he thought you were cute, gently telling him that you’ve got a boyfriend, then understanding he just needed your name for the sandwich. Realising you were walking the wrong way and having to about-face, causing everyone on the street to realise you were walking the wrong way. Think of the things we call cringeworthy – or, here, I can think of a few for you. The term is still fairly new to me, but the feeling is not. Some psychologists who study embarrassment call this feeling the distinction between the lived and the corporeal selves
Often in these moments we are reminded that there can be a stark difference between the way that you see you and the way that others see you the distance between is something the Emory University psychologist Philippe Rochat calls “the irreconcilable gap”. The moments that make us cringe are when we are yanked out of our own perspective, and we can suddenly see ourselves from somebody else’s point of view. I think in modern parlance, we would call that cringing.Ĭarpenter’s report, though it was written half a century ago, helped form what I have started to call Cringe Theory. “They were paralysed after their first startled response… they stood transfixed, staring at their images, only their stomach muscles betraying great tension.” To review: they ducked their heads, covered their mouths and tensed up their stomach muscles. The “tribesmen responded alike to these experiences: they ducked their heads and covered their mouths,” he reported. This trip he made in 1969 would change all that he brought with him mirrors and Polaroid cameras and video cameras and tape recorders, and a single-minded intention to record the Biami’s every response to this exercise in forced self-awareness.Īccording to Carpenter’s report, when the Biami people saw their entire selves reflected back to them in a mirror for the first time, they expressed what the anthropologist termed a “tribal terror of self-awareness”. Which meant, Carpenter reasoned, that they had never really seen themselves clearly. Beyond that, the rivers near their home didn’t provide clear enough reflections for a proper Narcissus moment. Nearly 50 years ago the American anthropologist Edmund Carpenter set off to Papua New Guinea to study the Biami tribe, a group of people which, he believed, had never seen mirrors, and certainly never cameras.
‘The moments that make us cringe are when we are yanked out of our own perspective’: Melissa Dahl. But the answer I did get was so much more interesting. Is it possible to cure yourself of this feeling? Or could there be a good reason why some of us are more prone to cringing? What, in other words, is the point of this feeling? A few years back I decided that if I was going to spend my life cringing at everything (mostly myself), I might as well try to understand the feeling a bit better. So this is how my obsession with this odd, overlooked little emotion began. And, perhaps, more prone to causing them. Every kid is hyper-aware of social rules, but learning different ones over and over again as I grew up made me even more sensitive to moments that deviate from the norm. You could wear Clueless-style kneesocks in southern Louisiana in the early 2000s, but in northern California you’d be side-eyed for clinging to a passé trend. You could love Hanson in Nashville in 1998, but in Chicago you’d better learn to like the Backstreet Boys. Awkward moments inevitably ensued every time I had to play the new kid, and I quickly learned that what is acceptable at one school will be roundly mocked at another. But I had a somewhat unique experience growing up in that my family moved every two years or so, which meant the second I got the hang of cool at one school, we’d leave for another town, and usually another state. Most of us went through an awkward stage, and I am no exception.
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