The Psychology of Cringe: Why We Can't Look Away

I feel it. You probably do, too. Someone posts a crying selfie, proposes at a wedding, or confidently sings off-key at karaoke and we cringe.

We cringe when we see something so awkward, embarrassing, or painfully lacking in self-awareness that it makes us recoil.

But we're attracted to it at the same time because — perhaps — we've experienced similar situations ourselves or we know and care about people who have embarrassed themselves and we felt empathy.

And that's why cringe is also known in psychology as secondhand or vicarious embarrassment. We feel it on behalf of other people as well as their feeling it themselves. And sometimes we just enjoy watching other people suffer in a socially awkward situation.

Cringe has an online community: There are cringe compilations, reaction channels on cringe, comedy and other formats built on people's most cringeworthy moments. And people appear to be hooked.

Stefan Hofmann, a clinical psychologist specializing in social anxiety disorder at Marburg University, Germany, says cringe videos are as addictive as junk food: "If you eat junk food, you want more of it [or] even more outrageous stuff," Hofmann said.

Why we can't we look away from cringe moments

Embarrassment is subjective. A bad grade won't embarrass a person who doesn't care about school, but it can trigger real embarrassment in a person for whom academic success is central to their sense of self, their identity.

"If you see a complete stranger misbehaving in public, you might get angry," said Frieder Paulus, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck, Germany.

"But if your kid is doing the same stuff, you might feel embarrassed, not only for the kid, but also for yourself," said Paulus, "because [you feel] the behavior of the kid reflects [on] you."

Embarrassment belongs to a class of emotions called emotional barometers. Emotional barometers include shame, pride, and guilt. They signal a social norm has been broken.

For people to feel embarrassment, they have to be aware of the social norms, the context of the situation, and be aware there is an audience watching them.

Our reactions to embarrassing situations are visible on a brain scan.

"We see failure ... the arousal region [lights] up because something is not okay," said Paulus.

Why cringe is a useful reaction

Matthew Feinberg, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, has found that people understand displays of embarrassment as a signal of prosocial behavior.

And that prosocial behavior creates a feeling of trust in the observer — they see that the person who is embarrassed knows they have done something socially awkward or wrong.

The message is: "I did something silly and I want to signal that it wasn't intentional and that I am a good member of society," said Feinberg.

On whether the same logic applies to the person observing someone else's mishap, Feinberg said witnessing embarrassment "triggers a natural response. My mind tells me to respond to that person with sympathy."

Feinberg said vicarious embarrassment may even be a stronger trust signal than being embarrassed yourself: "Possibly … because you're experiencing it even though you didn't do anything. It's an interesting research question that as far as I know hasn't been explored."

Exclusion: The cost of too much cringe

Embarrassment is also an expression of our fear that we may be excluded from a group when we do something embarrassing. For a social species such as that of humans and other animals, that can be dangerous.

"Fear of exclusion and fear of negative evaluation by others is painful psychologically as well as physically," said Hofmann. "It is certainly not the same quality of pain [as physical pain], but it's pain nonetheless."

In Hofmann's clinical work, he has tested so-called "social mishap exposures" in which patients embarrass themselves in an intentional and engineered way in an attempt to disprove the beliefs driving their fear or anxiety.

But cringe isn't something we can simply stop feeling. The emotion, researchers suggest, is involuntary and develops from an early age. And that also goes for associated emotions, such as empathy and trust, but also schadenfreude — not all of our addiction to cringe can be explained as an expression of positive emotion.

Hofmann says some people do experience pleasure when they see other people in embarrassing situations. And this distinction between empathy and schadenfreude also matters. If the pull toward cringe content was only about empathy, watching more of it would make us feel worse over time. But people keep watching cringe videos online.