People were asked about embarrassing situations like farting in a yoga class or getting tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Mental training can help overcome embarrassment.
Training the mind to be an observer rather than participating in the situation reduces feelings of distress and humiliation.
People sometimes go to great lengths to avoid embarrassing situations, said Dr Li Jiang, who led the study:
“Embarrassment prevents us from asking advice about what we should do, for example, about our mounting mortgage bills or unplanned pregnancies.
In many cases, if we are to help ourselves, and others, we must overcome our fear of embarrassment in social situations.”
Across three studies people were asked about a series of embarrassing situations: farting in a yoga class or on a date and getting tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Self-conscious people were more likely to take a first-person point of view when thinking of these situations.
In other words, they imagined it happening to them.
However, when they imagined themselves observing the situation from the outside, it reduced their distress.
The study was conducted in the context of marketing products for embarrassing conditions.
Dr Jiang explained:
“Our research shows that devising strategies to successfully reduce embarrassment avoidance is complicated.
This is because consumers will react differently to persuasion tactics depending on their level of public self-consciousness and their amount of available cognitive resources,
Dr Jiang said:
“Embarrassment-avoidance forms the basis for attempts to motivate consumers to buy a wide variety of products, from laundry detergents that can resolve rings around someone’s collar, to dishwasher liquid that can remove unsightly spots on dishes.
Our research is relevant to those situations in which marketers want to inoculate consumers against a fear of embarrassment and encourage them to take actions they might otherwise avoid.”
The study was published in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Jiang et al., 2018).
