The Psychology Behind Why We Get Secondhand Embarrassment

You know the feeling. You see something embarrassing happen to someone else—or you sit through a particular cringe-inducing scene in a sitcom or comedy movie—and you feel embarrassed on behalf of the person enduring it. But if we’re not involved, or even if the situation itself is entirely fictitious, why do we get this feeling of being embarrassed on someone else’s behalf? 

Why Do We Feel Embarrassment at All?

Psychologists believe that embarrassment likely developed in humans as a means of recognizing and responding to our own wrongdoings or shame as a kind of internal feedback, thereby making us less inclined to put ourselves in such a situation again. Its outward physical signs, meanwhile—like blushing, sweating, stammering, and a rapid heart rate—perhaps emerged as a nonverbal means of exhibiting to other people that we’ve recognized what has happened or what we have done, and accepted its repercussions.

Demonstrating this physically to other members of our social group might therefore have emerged as a means of showing contrition, repairing bonds, and ensuring that relationships weren’t lost or fractured by whatever we had done. 

As we have gone on to become ever more emotionally complex creatures, of course, our feelings of embarrassment have developed with us. So now all manner of occurrences and situations—both good and bad—can elicit the same red-faced reaction. You might feel embarrassed when winning a prize or being complimented in front of other people, for instance, just as much as you would for some more humiliating, shameful, or socially awkward experience.

And such is the complexity of embarrassment in humans today that we can even feel embarrassed on other people’s behalf. 

Feeling Shame on Someone Else’s Behalf

What we call second-hand embarrassment is properly termed vicarious embarrassment, although it is also variously known as third-party embarrassment, empathic embarrassment, fremdscham (German for “external shame,” contrasting it with schadenfreude), and even “Spanish shame”—a term thought perhaps to have emerged from the popularity of Latin telenovelas in the United States, and the cringe-inducing scenarios they often depict.

No matter the name, though, secondhand embarrassment feels just like personal embarrassment: we might cringe, blush, tremble, stammer, sweat, and just generally feel awkward, despite not actually being involved ourselves.

It’s All About Empathy

Curiously, research has shown that we don’t even need to know the other person for us to experience this secondhand feeling, and nor does the person in question even need to be aware of the embarrassment for us to feel bad for them.

They could be blissfully unaware of how awkward a situation they have found themselves in—walking around with their belt unfastened, or toilet paper stuck to their shoe, for instance—and therefore feel no shame or embarrassment themselves, despite us cringing and trembling at the thought or sight of it. 

For that reason, secondhand embarrassment is considered different from a so-called shared emotion, or emotional contagion—like crying when you see someone upset, or laughing at someone else’s joy. These reactions essentially involve mirroring someone else’s feelings, an evolutionary trait we also likely developed as a way of establishing social bonds and relationships.

Instead, psychologists have theorized that we feel bad on other people’s behalf—whether we know them or not, or they are aware of it or not—as a means of expressing empathy. In other words, we can imagine ourselves in that embarrassing situation, and our ability to mentally take the place of the person who is actually in that situation is enough to spark the same physical reaction in us, regardless of whether we know the person or not. And the more empathetic a person you are, ultimately, the stronger this reaction tends to be. 

It’s for this reason that some people find cringe comedy so uncomfortable that they simply bear to watch the awkwardness unfold. Other people, though, seem far less susceptible to such feelings—and rather than feel uncomfortable or embarrassed, might even revel in the sight of someone else’s discomfort. 

That doesn’t mean that if you enjoy cringe-inducing situations that you’re any less of an empath, though. There might be genetic factors in play here, or it might simply be the case that you had less experience of this kind of situation in childhood, when the groundwork of our personalities was first laid down. Perhaps, too, you might simply have more robust mental boundaries in place to stop the more immediate physical reactions and sense of awkwardness from manifesting themselves. 

In that sense, secondhand embarrassment is increasingly coming to be seen as part of a spectrum, with some of us being more empathetically aligned with other people—and therefore feeling this vicarious embarrassment strongly—while some of us are, for whatever reason, at the other end of the spectrum, and so do not react quite so intensely.