The Psychology of "Cringe"

What exactly is cringe? Let’s put it this way: Has someone who can’t stay in pitch ever tried to sing to you in a romantic way? Or perhaps, when a co-worker has turned up late, you’ve joked, “Did someone die?” — only to be told that he’d just come from a funeral? Another cringe classic: In a friendly group, one person turns to another and asks when her baby is due, only to be told that she isn’t pregnant. And perhaps the ultimate in cringe: 2020’s Imagine video, “performed” a-cappella by a series of celebrities in response to the worldwide COVID pandemic.

Source: OpenAI / ChatGPT-4

You get the idea. Cringe is global, cringe is universal — but it’s also deeply personal. Which brings up a serious question: Why do these memories, which are so awkward and unpleasant to revisit, keep haunting us? One would hope that our most embarrassing moments would quickly be forgotten by others, so why do they tend to stick with us for so long?

The answer has a little bit to do with our brains, and a little bit to do with the way we live. Humans are social animals, and in order to get along as well as possible with our friends and neighbors, most of us are programmed — neurologically speaking — to feel bad if we do things that cause pain or embarrassment. For example, when someone feels guilty about taking advantage of another person, they are less likely to do so again; writ large, this tendency promotes an overall movement toward greater interpersonal kindness.

And inside the brain — according to a 2023 paper by Piretti et al, published in Brain Science — shame and embarrassment are associated with the left anterior insula, while guilt appears to be processed in the left temporo-parietal junction (a region of the brain associated with social cognition). Other areas of the brain (including the dorsal anterior cingulate, the thalamus, and the premotor cortex) are activated when we experience pain related to social relationships, and also when we decide what to do next. Other neurological studies, such as an earlier paper by Piretti et al. in Frontiers in Neuroscience, have produced findings indicating that the amygdala — an almond-shaped structure in the medial temporal lobe of the brain — may play a role in working through social uncertainties, and could thus be helpful in identifying shame-inducing violations of social norms.

When asking ourselves why we over-index on memories of cringey experiences, it’s also important to recognize that these memories might sometimes be faulty, or even exaggerated. In other words, we could be remembering embarrassing incidents as having been worse than they actually were. The “spotlight effect,” according to Gilovich et al., refers to the very human tendency to overestimate the salience of our mistakes to others. In Gilovich’s 2000 experiment, participants consistently imagined that more people would remember the awkward things they said, or an embarrassing aspect of their clothing, than they actually did. “People appear to anchor on their own rich phenomenological experience and then adjust — insufficiently — to take into account the perspective of others,” Gilovich et al. stated in their article, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

People may also be biased toward negativity for self-protective reasons: Remembering our mistakes can be helpful, if it gives us a leg up in avoiding future errors. For example, if you make a dumb joke in polite company and hear nothing but uncomfortable silence in response, you’ll be a lot less likely to attempt the same kind of joke again. Even a wild animal would benefit from the same cognitive bias: imagine a gentle gazelle, sidling up to a watering hole, dipping its head to the water… and receiving the fright of its life when a crocodile leaps out with its toothy jaws wide open. Provided the gazelle gets away, it won’t likely return to that same watering hole anytime soon.

But you’re not a gazelle, and remembering the time you called your 4th grade teacher “Mom” in front of the whole class probably won’t help you much in other situations — so what can you do when that memory keeps turning up on sleepless nights? How can you reprocess cringey moments so that you’ve learned from the experience, but don’t feel so awful when you think back on the original experience?

First of all, you can give yourself a reality check. Think back on Gilovich’s paper about the human tendency to overestimate the amount of attention that others are likely to give our embarrassments. The key word there is overestimate. Maybe you think your own cringey moment has been made over into a story that someone else is still telling (in the manner of “can you believe what I just saw someone do…!”) But if you’ve really overestimated how much other people care, then that also means that other people generally don’t see our mistakes as that much of a big deal. Only we do!

And even those times when all the attention clearly was on you, and you messed up publicly in a big way, maybe there’s another way to look at it. If your mistake would have been funny to others — say, the time you leaned on an escalator handrail at the mall, while talking to someone you wanted to impress, and were dragged up the escalator by your crotch — maybe it can be funny to you, too. Are you the same person who made that mistake? Are you safe from the embarrassment now? Mark Twain may once have said that “humor is tragedy plus time,” so if enough time has passed, maybe you can start to laugh at the memory, too. This is a form of cognitive reframing: teaching yourself that there’s another way to see something painful or difficult, then learning to grow from the change.

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Lastly, if you ruminate too much — if you really do find yourself anxious and unhappy about unpleasant events that happened years ago — you might benefit from learning to ground yourself better in the present. Mindfulness meditation is the practice of focusing your attention on the moment right now, without being distracted by judgments about yourself, memories of the past, or worries about the future. The basic principles of mindfulness are not difficult, although taking time to do it each day can feel daunting. Nevertheless, if you have trouble keeping your mind on track — if you habitually torment yourself with recollections of the past — learning to meditate could be helpful to you.

Whatever it is that you did “that one time,” please remember that the memory most likely lives on in your mind, alone. If you can learn to laugh at it, or convert it into a significant teaching moment, or turn your attention away from it through mindfulness or insight — you’ll be better off. Really, in the end, the only reason to hold on to an embarrassing memory is to learn from it.