Still thinking about that awkward run-in at work?

Here's why you should stop perseverating on those moments of poorly timed jokes and forgetting your new colleague's name.

Recently I had lunch with a colleague, and we got to talking about all of the awkward moments we’ve had at work. “During the pandemic, I met a student for the first time for an in-person training session—we were all in masks.” He tells me. “But in the middle of the day she went home and changed clothes, and came back. I walked up to her and said, ‘hi I’m Steve, nice to meet you.’ We just spent 6 hours together and all it took was a new sweater for me to completely forget who she was.”

Naturally “Steve” (I changed his name) spent the last few years avoiding her in the hall. And clearly the moment still feels as fresh as a daisy.

But Steve’s not alone in inability to let new-sweater-situation go. We all seem to be feeling a bit awkward these days. During the pandemic, most of us let our social muscles atrophy a bit, and coming out of it, we’ve found mundane moments like small talk with the dentist to be more painful than they need to be. Even now, I routinely interact with people who apologize for their “awkwardness” right out the gate (some are even trying on an awkward brand for their social media groupies).

I’ve been studying anxiety in social interactions for a few decades now, and I’m well-acquainted with all of the ways in which we leak our discomfort through verbal and non-verbal behaviors. How our physiologic signals can provide insight into people’s “under the skin” feelings of anxiety, even when they aren’t willing to report them. And how anticipatory anxiety can wreak havoc on social interactions, leading people to see others’ behaviors more in-line with their expectations, than with what the person is actually doing.

When I first started thinking about social awkwardness, I figured it was just another iteration of anxiety.

But now I think differently, in large part to my student Sydney Phlegar, who’s been spending the last year or so digging into the form and function of social awkwardness.

Sydney, rocking her U of Michigan pride

What makes awkwardness special?

From Sydney’s perspective—and the research (so far) bears this out—awkwardness isn’t something people are, it’s something people do. It’s like a dance gone wrong, where two (or more) people can’t quite find their footing. And half the time they don’t even know if the dance is over, and who ended it.

Sydney’s interested in the normal everyday moments where we freeze—not sure of how to proceed. “These moments stick with us for a while, but there’s very little science on them,” she says.

The first project we started was simple. With no hypotheses in mind, we asked 100 people to tell us about an awkward interaction that happened within the presence of at least one other person. We coded the content of their descriptions, and looked for patterns in follow-up questions about their emotions, whether there was conflict involved, and how they thought their partners felt.

Awkward interactions, we learned, are more than norm violations. Rarely do they involve any form of immoral behavior (like making a racist joke). And they also rarely involved conflict. But one theme that came out loud and clear across all of the awkward scenarios we coded is this: people leave them feeling highly uncertain.

Here are four main themes Sydney identified that can help us understand our own awkward experiences.

One, they are spontaneous.

Anxiety can be anticipated (and often is). But awkwardness is spontaneous. In fact, 90% of the people in Sydney’s study did not see the awkward interaction coming. And because of this, they had no social script to handle it.

“These are all new situations,” Sydney tells me, “and because of that, we don’t have scripts. Ways of dissipating the discomfort.” Most of us aren’t taught how to handle say, what to do if someone calls us the wrong name, makes an ill-timed joke, or gets fired in front of us. Awkward interaction training is not a thing (but it probably should be).

Two, awkward interactions are left unresolved. At least in people’s heads.

When coding the interactions, Sydney defined resolution as: “all parties present walked away feeling as if the awkwardness was explicitly recognized or dealt with.” 86% of the time, people just walked away with the awkwardness in the air.

And it’s not the case that people don’t try to take action. Many do, but they are unsure of whether they were successful.

For example, imagine saying at a party, “I hate the TV show Family Guy. I think that show is so dumb and I don’t get why people think it’s funny.” And someone says back (I’m sure you know where I’m going here), “I LOVE that show!” You might then try to back-track, tell that person that there are indeed some episodes of Family Guy that are good, yada yada.

Sydney found that “most of the time, these attempts end with words tangled in the mouth.” We don’t know, really, if our partners are buying the whole “some episodes are funny” bit. Usually the interaction moves on to a new topic, and you walk away not knowing if your Family-Guy-loving-friend is irritated with you. Resolution, when it comes to awkwardness, is really hard to read.

Third, most of these interactions occurred a long time ago.

Most of the interactions people reported on in our study didn’t happen yesterday. Or last week. The median amount of time since the interaction was experienced was 6 months, with a handful of interactions that occurred 20-40 years ago. And it’s not the case that we only hang onto the really bad ones. These long-time-ago interactions were pretty mundane (think calling a waitress the wrong name at a Burger King).

Awkwardness might be one of the stickiest types of social interaction, remaining in our memories for decades.

Fourth, we think awkward interactions are worse for us than they are for our partners.

This finding surprised me. With anxiety, we usually see the opposite—we believe that our partners found the interaction much more stressful than we did (and more than they actually did). But with awkwardness, we found that people believed they were more physically stressed, had less control, and felt more negatively than their partners felt.

“Maybe we are pitying ourselves a bit” Sydney told me. With awkwardness, “there’s a spotlight on the self, and we are so self-conscious, we are unable to recognize that we are all going through the same thing.”

Most of what people perseverate on is their own feelings. But this is a good thing—it’s much easier to move around people’s own emotions and perceptions of themselves, than it is the perceptions of their partners.

Awkward interactions aren’t going away anytime soon. But do we really need to worry so much about these interactions?

The next step of Sydney’s research is to dig into why awkward interactions are so sticky in memory. She thinks it’s due in large part to their unresolved nature. In much of the same way that we still think about exes we had incomplete endings with, we hang onto awkward social interactions, perseverating on what our partners are thinking, and what we could have said and done differently.

Getting some traction on what a proper resolution looks like is the next goal of Sydney’s research.

But for now, try not to hang on too tightly to your awkward interactions. I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal with Daniel Yudkin on “how to tell if you’re the office jerk,” where we dug into the Reddit Thread “Am I the asshole?” (focusing on workplace questions). We discovered something surprising:

Being awkward doesn’t make you an asshole, but punishing awkward people does. Criticizing other people’s mis-steps was the one category that readers of thread pretty much universally agreed puts you squarely into asshole category.

So the next time you feel awkward, remind yourself, “the reason I’m perseverating so much on this is because it didn’t feel resolved. Not because the other person is still thinking about it.”

Want to learn more about my work, or what else makes us jerks? Check out my website!