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Embarrassment makes people trust you
The embarrassed face
Embarrassment has its own motor pattern: the blush, an averted gaze, looking away, and hiding the face. It surfaced in a lab where people blasted with a sudden noise turned embarrassed right after being startled.
Why it earns trust
Someone calls a friend by the wrong name and apologizes, and it matters. People who get embarrassed are liked more, trusted more, given more resources, and judged to be good group members.
The same signal shows up in flirting. A man who says the wrong thing and shows no embarrassment comes across as creepy, while embarrassment shows empathy and self-reflection.
When the brain lacks it
Damage to the orbital frontal cortex, a region involved in ethical consideration, can come from a fall off a motorcycle or a ladder. People with that damage fail to show embarrassment where they should, and others find them creepy or see them as not playing by the rules. Embarrassment tells everyone that a person knows the rules and cares about them.
Why does embarrassment show up as a blush?
Charles Darwin called blushing the most peculiar and most human of all expressions in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The blush comes from the widening of blood vessels in the face and neck, which is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. A person cannot easily fake or suppress it. Because it is involuntary, observers tend to read it as honest.
How does brain damage erase embarrassment?
The orbitofrontal cortex, just behind the eyes, helps weigh the social consequences of actions. In a 2003 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Jennifer Beer, Dacher Keltner, and colleagues tested patients with orbitofrontal damage on tasks that would embarrass most people. The patients showed little or no embarrassment and behaved in socially inappropriate ways. The 1848 case of Phineas Gage, who survived an iron rod through his frontal lobes, was an early sign that damage there can change social conduct.
Why do people trust someone who blushes?
In a 2012 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Matthew Feinberg, Robb Willer, and Dacher Keltner found that people who showed more embarrassment were more generous in economic games. Observers who watched recordings of embarrassed people rated them as more trustworthy. The researchers argued that embarrassment is a costly signal of commitment to others' good opinion. Observers also tended to give embarrassed people more cooperation in follow-up games.
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