A Blush Tells People You Can Be Trusted

The blush, the averted gaze, and the urge to hide your face are hard to fake, and they show you care about the group's rules.

Emotion researcher Dacher Keltner found that display while working in the lab of Paul Ekman, who ran the lab. Keltner was studying the automatic flinch people make when they are startled. He blasted volunteers with sudden noise out of the blue, and noticed that after being startled, many showed a different response. They blushed, averted their gaze, looked away, and hid their face, joking that they thought they had spit or peed their pants. Ekman said that display was a motor pattern of emotion, and told him to study it.

That display signals commitment to the group. Charles Darwin, who wrote about human expression, argued that embarrassment shows allegiance to the collective. Keltner describes a rich literature making the same point. When you call someone by the wrong name, or pass gas in yoga class, and look embarrassed and apologize, other people like you more, trust you more, give more resources to you, and see you as a good group member.

Darwin wrote that the blush is a sign of healthy character, which Keltner describes as almost moral virtue. The failure to show it is telling. Keltner points to patients with damage to the orbital frontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in ethical consideration, caused by brain trauma such as falling off a motorcycle or a ladder. They do not show embarrassment where they should, and other people experience them as creepy, or as not playing by the rules.

Keltner also points to sociologist Erving Goffman, who wrote about embarrassment as a way of telling other people that you know the rules and are committed to them. That is why people judge someone who shows embarrassment as more likable and more worthy of trust.