Awkwardness Out Loud

Embarrassment gets worse when you have to feel it and hide it at the same time.

Before speaking, a person monitors their voice, their hands, their breathing, and whether anyone has noticed that they are monitoring their hands and breathing. Limited computing power is left over for the content.

A simple admission sometimes removes half the load:

I’m a little nervous.

I haven’t done this before.

I’ll need a second to gather myself.

Most people react normally. Many start to sympathise, because they recognise their own experience.

But the admission is not a compulsory ritual. In some environments vulnerability really is used against people. Then it is better to choose a neutral form, or simply to slow down.

A deliberate small piece of clumsiness can also reduce the fear of being flawless. If a person makes a harmless mistake themselves and calmly carries on, the sense that any imperfection will destroy the talk disappears.

The main thing is not to turn this into constant self-deprecation. Someone who humiliates himself in advance to deny others the chance to do it first is still being run by fear.

Confidence does not necessarily look like an absence of nerves.

The admission works because it removes the second task. A person who says “this is my first time running this meeting, don’t be alarmed if I stumble” stops spending resources on camouflage and returns them to the content. Listeners do not usually start thinking worse of him: they could see he was nervous anyway, and before the admission they had to pretend they could not. The other half of the load, meanwhile, is lifted not from the speaker but from the room: listening to someone who is visibly nervous and pretending not to be is uncomfortable for everyone.

The limit on the technique is strict: it works once. One warning at the start is useful information. The same thing every ten minutes is a request for support, and the audience stops answering it fairly quickly.

Often it looks like a person who is nervous, notices it and goes on talking anyway.

Sources and further reading

Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585–589. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124

Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617–638. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.3.617

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1976). Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 105(1), 3–46. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.105.1.3

Part V