A man knows he should speak up about the sexist behaviour of his coworkers, but doesn’t, because they’re his friends and he doesn’t want to make it awkward. A tenured professor is bothered by her colleague’s flirtatious remarks, but says nothing, because it would be awkward to bring it up. A person runs into a recently bereaved coworker, and wonders whether to address their loss, but doesn’t know what to say, so doesn’t mention it.
We often joke about awkwardness; it’s a staple of contemporary comedy. The exclamation ‘Awkward!’ functions as a light-hearted deflection, defusing social tension. The reality is heavier. Awkwardness can be funny, but it can also be serious – it inhibits our ability to act even when we know we should, and it can shut down or pre-empt conversations about important topics like menstruation, money, menopause, mortality. The desire to avoid awkwardness acts as a powerful social inhibition, preventing people from speaking up, and motivating compliance with problematic social and moral norms. So, which is it, then? Is awkwardness a funny, quirky, everyday occurrence, something we should learn to live with and even embrace? Is it a serious social inhibitor with negative implications for moral decision-making and social change? Or – in truly awkward fashion – might it be both?
It often seems that awkwardness is a personal problem. Indeed, one of the most surprising things I discovered while writing my book Awkwardness (2024) was just how many people self-identify as awkward – and how attached people become to this label. Movies and popular culture reinforce the idea of awkward people, typically portrayed as socially inept misfits who stick out and don’t fit in with trends or social norms. This focus on individuals suggests that the best way to avoid awkwardness is through silence and conformity – to imitate others, blend in, and say nothing.
But this is only part of the story, and it gets awkwardness wrong in important ways. Yes, awkwardness is caused by a failure to conform to existing social norms. But this failure isn’t individual and, rather than think in terms of awkward people, we ought to think in terms of awkward situations. And yes, awkwardness can be painful, and unpleasant. But it’s not embarrassing, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Contrary to popular belief, our awkward moments aren’t cringeworthy. Rather than cringing inwardly about them, we ought to examine them more closely. Because once we realise the true nature of awkwardness, we can stop seeing it as an individual failure and start seeing it as an opportunity for social change. In short: we should take awkwardness less personally, and more seriously.
What is awkwardness? This turns out to be a tricky question. Most of us know it when we see it (or experience it), but definitions are hard to come by. Partly that’s because empirical work on awkwardness tends to treat it as a type or symptom of embarrassment. But this is a mistake. Embarrassment happens when an individual commits a social gaffe; its characteristic facial and bodily expressions involve a kind of apology. Embarrassment is thus a kind of social repair. But awkwardness is different: it’s not something an individual causes, and it’s not something an individual can resolve on their own; it’s a social rupture. The failure involved in embarrassment is a failure to conform to existing norms. Awkwardness is different: it happens when we don’t have a social script to conform to. In other words, embarrassment happens when we violate socially prescribed scripts; awkwardness happens when we lack prescriptions to guide us.
People often feel like awkwardness is about them – that they are awkward, or not. But awkwardness is a collective production. More accurately, it’s a collective failure. Awkwardness is a kind of normative negative space, offering what Adam Kotsko calls ‘insight through breakdown’. It arises when people find themselves suddenly without a social script to guide them through an interaction or an event. The term ‘script’ carries associations of playacting, and that’s not a bad way to understand awkwardness. But the lesson of awkwardness is that, in the dramedy of life, we’re not just the actors, we’re the writers.
Is this a date, or a work dinner? When two people land on different answers: awkward!
The sociologist Erving Goffman recognised that social interaction is a kind of performance in which we occupy various roles. When a performance fails, the actor feels discredited – to use Goffman’s term, he loses ‘face’. Maybe he’s trying to play a role his audience won’t grant him (for example, a failed attempt to flirt, or a rejected marriage proposal) or he loses his composure and botches the performance. We usually perform one self at a time: our roles and our audiences are ‘segregated’, thereby preventing the kind of uncomfortable clash that can happen when, say, you run into your boss while out on a date, or have to talk about sex with your parents. But sometimes this clash is unavoidable, and things can get awkward. A character on the TV show My So-Called Life (1994-5) summed up the problem: ‘What I, like, dread is when people who know you in completely different ways end up in the same area. And you have to develop this, like, combination you on the spot.’
The ‘on the spot’ nature of social performance marks a disanalogy with theatre: unlike an actor memorising a script, the social scripts that guide everyday interactions are highly flexible and shift quickly, without explicit negotiation or reflection. A single person will play many roles in the course of a day, or even a single afternoon. In this sense, our interactions are more like social improvisation than scripted drama. And like improvisation, successful social interaction depends on a cooperative partner willing to go along with the scene.
The social cues by which we navigate the world range from the explicit – a dress code; the ‘no presents’ written on a party invitation – to the nearly imperceptible. Even where cues are explicit, there are often unspoken understandings in place: what counts as ‘black tie’ or ‘festive cocktail attire’? Is the request ‘no presents’ really to be taken literally, or is it merely a polite pretence that everyone will ignore? Slight changes in a conversational partner’s speech pattern; a gaze held just a little too long; a centimetre of physical distance – any of these can shift people’s understanding of the interaction taking place. Is this a date, or a work dinner? Are they about to hug, kiss or shake hands? When two people land on different answers: awkward!
Awkwardness thrives in uncertainty. This explains the link between awkwardness and silence: since silence can mean so many things, it makes it difficult to coordinate on and curate an interpretation of a situation. For example, is no one speaking up because no one else has a problem with the sexist comment someone just made? Or is everyone as uncomfortable as I am, but equally unsure how to act? Sometimes silence is acquiescence; other times, it’s a form of protest. In contrast to an explicitly voiced objection, the silence on an issue can be hard to read.
Indeed, awkwardness is fundamentally a kind of social disorientation. There’s a certain comfort in being able to socially situate oneself. That’s not to say that hierarchies are comfortable or beneficial for everyone – far from it. But even as social rejection and downranking hurt, there is a different kind of discomfort that comes along with being socially lost and disoriented, and this is the discomfort associated with awkwardness. This disorientation is built into the very etymology of the term: it derives from the Middle English ‘awk’, meaning ‘wrong’ or ‘clumsy’, and the English suffix ‘-ward’, denoting direction or orientation – yielding ‘facing the wrong way’. But just like passing someone on a road, facing the right way depends on knowing how things are done around here.
Awkwardness requires the presence of others: individuals aren’t awkward, interactions are
Knowing social scripts is one thing; truly internalising them is another. From the Italian sprezzatura to the French nonchalance to the Chinese concept of wu wei, various traditions have admired the ability ‘to practise in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort’, as the 16th-century Italian diplomat Baldassare Castiglione put it. By contrast, contemporary putdowns like ‘try-hard’ or ‘pick me’ show that it’s not enough to know the social script; its execution should look effortless.
This is one way awkwardness functions to distinguish insiders and outsiders. It’s also why we should be wary of labelling others ‘awkward’. This gets awkwardness wrong – it’s not a personality or character trait, but something that emerges from social interactions. Awkwardness requires the presence of others: individuals aren’t awkward, interactions are. This might seem surprising: people often describe themselves (or others) as ‘awkward’, and it seems that some people do have more difficulty navigating social interactions than others. But there are practical as well as theoretical reasons for resisting the idea that awkwardness is an individual trait. The label ‘awkward’ is not as innocuous as it seems: it’s ambiguous, and it obscures more than it reveals.
For example, suppose I describe my colleague Rob as ‘awkward at parties’. This is ambiguous: am I saying that he feels awkward at parties, or that he makes me feel awkward at parties? Or both? This ambiguity creates a dangerous space for bias or even ostracism: I may mistake my own discomfort at Rob’s presence for a property of Rob – projecting my own feelings of awkwardness on to him in a sort of pathetic fallacy. For example, suppose Rob is in a wheelchair, and I have little experience interacting with wheelchair users. I might feel some uncertainty about how to approach the situation, worrying about saying ‘the wrong thing’ or not knowing whether to stand or kneel while speaking with him. Using the term ‘awkward’ risks placing responsibility for my discomfort on to Rob. Not only is this fundamentally unfair, but it means that I’m less likely to try to remedy my ignorance – what arrangement would make Rob most comfortable? And since I’ve now classified Rob (in my own mind, if not to others) as ‘awkward’, I may be less likely to seek out interactions with him in the future. As the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed writes in The Promise of Happiness (2010): ‘To create awkwardness is to be read as being awkward. Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies “go along with it’’.’
We can now begin to see how awkwardness becomes threatening, and how it can be weaponised, as Megan Garber has argued in The Atlantic. Because awkwardness is often aversive, those perceived as causing it risk ostracism. Changing social norms and rituals isn’t easy; adopting new ones can be costly. The person whose presence reveals the inadequacy of the status quo thus presents a threat. For example, in a department where the men routinely take clients to a strip club after dinner, or tell sexually explicit jokes in meetings, the presence of women colleagues might make things awkward, as they are forced to confront the clash between their workplace rituals and professional norms. One option would be to accept this conflict as of their own making, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. But too often, it’s the presence of the women that is blamed: now it’s awkward to tell those jokes, because there are women here. Blame falls on those perceived as different for ‘making’ things awkward. In many cases, though, it was awkward all along: that awkwardness was just being borne by someone else, as they tried to conform to others’ expectations.
Understood in these terms, awkwardness won’t necessarily become any less unpleasant to experience. But it’s worth paying more attention to when and where it arises, and be more willing to tackle it head-on. An unspoken expectation in many social interactions is that people already know how to navigate them. People avoid admitting social ignorance, and we are embarrassed by those who do, as if they’ve violated some unspoken social norm. But why should not knowing which pronoun, title or fork to use be any different from not knowing where the bathroom is, or what time the café opens? The reluctance to ask that social norms be made explicit reveals a deeper expectation: that social interaction should appear effortless. Awkwardness highlights the fact that our interactions are scripted. Its aversiveness shows the extent to which people prefer not to be reminded of this fact. And the lucky among us may not have to be.
We engage with physical infrastructure daily, often without thinking about it. That thoughtlessness is a privilege: when I walk into the lecture theatre and reach for the light switch, it’s more or less at arm’s reach, and I expect that to be the case in every room I walk into. Sometimes, the cord that pulls down the screen is a bit too high for me and I have to stand on a chair, and this is mildly annoying, embarrassing even. At that point I begin to feel irritated with the design of the room. I might wonder, who is it made for? Social scripts are like light switches and cords – we reach for them automatically, only really noticing their placement or existence when they’re not where we expect or need them to be. Of course, that’s not true for everyone. For many people, navigating the demands of daily life requires giving a good deal of thought to the placement of light switches, doorknobs and the like. For people who are neurodivergent, who struggle with reading facial cues, or who find themselves in unfamiliar social settings, the world is full of rooms with unpredictable, unreachable infrastructure. Awkwardness is a reminder that social infrastructure exists and that it is not equally accessible to everyone.
Because awkwardness is felt as a form of social discomfort, it doesn’t attach to everyone equally
The good news is that with effort and attention, social resources can be made more accessible. Awkwardness highlights where that work needs to happen. Understanding the social origins of awkwardness also helps reconceptualise it. Instead of thinking about it as a personal failure – a cringeworthy source of personal embarrassment, or shame – it can be recognised for what it is: the result of collective ignorance or absence.
And this is where the trope of the awkward misfit does a disservice. When awkwardness is understood as an individual failure to fit in, the response is supposed to be: do better; conform; learn the script. But that’s not always possible. Nor is it always desirable. In some cases, those norms are not serving everyone – or anyone. For example, many job interviews now eschew small talk and follow-up questions, following a scripted formula in which candidates are all asked the same questions with no follow-ups. This may feel awkward, especially for interviewers used to casual chit-chat. But that same chit-chat might unfairly skew the process by emphasising considerations of ‘fit’ and disadvantaging candidates who have less in common with interviewers. Professors may feel awkward asking students to share their pronouns, but this takes the burden of awkwardness off the students who might otherwise have had to jump in and correct people’s assumptions.
The upshot is that awkwardness isn’t something an individual should, or even can, fix on their own. To view awkwardness as shameful, or embarrassing, is therefore not just a philosophical mistake but a practical one: it is to miss out on an opportunity to repair the social infrastructure. Take the case of pronouns again: someone who finds it awkward to state their pronouns, but understands this awkwardness in terms of shame, might see the problem as stemming from a lack of courage or assertiveness, and feel bad about their failure to speak up. This puts the burden on them, going into new social or professional situations, to summon up the courage to change how they introduce themselves, which can make new interactions a source of stress or anxiety. If we understand awkwardness in terms of social scripts, things are different: the person might work with friends or colleagues to think about ways to build pronouns into introductions, or emails, or the structure of meetings.
But it’s important, too, to be mindful of who’s doing this work. Because awkwardness is felt as a form of social discomfort, it doesn’t attach to everyone equally. Social expectations of who does the work to make others feel comfortable – and correspondingly, who is held accountable when people feel uncomfortable – intersect with scripts around gender and social status. Women are often tasked with managing others’ moods and are expected to get along with others; this ‘emotional labour’ includes the work of repairing social interactions that become awkward. There’s a privilege in not worrying about others’ discomfort.
All of this might seem like a lot to put on a minor, everyday irritation. If we’re used to thinking of awkwardness as the kind of thing that crops up on bad dates, or a minor annoyance of office life, then what I’ve been saying so far might seem a bit overblown. Doesn’t everyone have awkward moments, and is it really such a big deal? The answer is that some of us have more awkward moments than others. And some awkward moments are a big deal: it matters that we have social scripts to talk about grief, or harassment, or race, because not talking about these topics erases an important part of people’s experiences. The silence associated with awkwardness can function to erase important parts of people’s experiences. But if we listen to it carefully, it can also tell us where more work is needed. The work of building our social infrastructure often goes unremarked upon. Awkwardness alerts us to the fact that our social norms are under construction. It’s an opportunity to examine the work that goes into our social lives, and why that work so often remains invisible.
In the drama of life, we don’t have to settle for being actors – we can be writers, too. Not everyone can afford to do this work. Not everyone’s contributions receive equal credit. But for those of us willing and able, awkward moments are an alert that our current social scripts are not working, and an opportunity to get to work writing better ones.
