Awkwardness with Alexandra Plakias
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Also, you probably know about our Patreon already, but that's a great place to support us in an ongoing fashion, to receive access to bonus segments, our Discord community, and monthly Zooms with David and yours truly. Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where, um... I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. And I'm Dr. David Peña-Guzman.

And yeah, whether it's awkward laughter, awkward silence, or... Awkward people. Today's the day we're talking about it. A recent study showed that one in four adult Americans consider themselves more awkward than other people.

And among 18 to 29 year olds, the number rises to 37%. So like a third of young people, a third of our target audience feels awkward. And a quarter of Americans in general feel they are more awkward than most people.

Although I have to say the statistics are kind of bizarre because it still is than 50%. So technically speaking, they could be right. Yeah, they could be right. Yeah. It's like, you know, that statistic that when people say, you know, 50% of doctors graduated with below average scores from med school and people are like, what? They shouldn't be doctors then. But it's just the nature of the statistics. Here it goes the other way. Right.

There should be more people who think that they are more awkward than the average American. It should be 50%. Totally. I know this doesn't actually kind of surprise me the more that I think about it, that it's not more people. But I will say one explanation of that could be found in the book that we're going to be talking about today because we're interviewing the author of it a bit later, this book, Awkwardness, a Theory. And the author of it, Alexandra Plakias, says,

says that she doesn't think there are any awkward people, only awkward situations. And so this statistic would be wrong in the sense that according to Plakias, nobody is awkward. So one in four Americans are wrong that they're awkward, not because they're wrong that they're more awkward than other people, but because no person in and of themselves is awkward.

Yeah, and although all those people would be wrong literally about themselves on Plagueis' account, she does talk about what reasons one might have for using awkward as a self-descriptor. She wrote this blog on the Oxford University Press' blog.

Talking about how often when you call yourself an awkward person, that's a way of protecting yourself. And in some cases, even immunizing yourself against the consequences of your action and sort of putting off responsibility for the things that you do. And she talks about how this is something that's quite common in the culture of Silicon Valley with all these people.

People like Mark Zuckerberg, who will say things like, oh, I'm just a socially awkward, nerdy guy. Don't hold me accountable for not being up to date on social norms about how to behave in public.

Yeah, and that tech bro is a paradigm, I think, of awkwardness today. But that's a paradigm that I think a lot of people resent or find frustrating, at least in broader culture. In part because oftentimes, yeah, that charge of being awkward comes alongside a lot of social privilege and a sense of like, yeah, well, don't expect me to smooth out a situation. That's your job, right? That's the job of the peons. But I think also like...

A lot of everyday people identify as awkward, as we can see from this statistic. And one thing that interests me is the line between awkwardness and cringe. Like when I was in college, in the heyday of the sort of emo, boho, indie energy of the early 2000s. That's quite a description. It was really common to be like, I'm so awkward as you sort of

Moved your side bangs away from your eye. And now we've moved from, I think, talking about awkwardness to talking about cringe. But cringe and awkward are different things. So for one, cringe is usually used in a sort of hostile or judgmental sense, whereas awkwardness feels like there's something kind of more shared or eliciting empathy in the way that we...

often use it. There's a philosopher, Thomas J. Spiegel, who portrays cringe as an essentially hostile reaction to a social faux pas. And this seems pretty different from awkwardness. And indeed, Plakias talks about the distinction between cringe and awkwardness in her book as well. And she said that the two phenomena are kind of wrongly seen as related because they both involve embarrassment, but actually awkwardness is something quite different.

Yeah, I don't think anybody, including myself, when I had long bangs, Ellie, in undergrad, and I would iron them out so they would be long and smooth and I could flip them over my forehead. You know, nobody says, uh-huh, I'm so cringe in the same way that maybe we used to say I'm so awkward. And I do think it has to do with the hostility of cringe, but...

Also with the fact that I think of cringe as a property of behaviors, whereas I think of awkwardness as like the vibe, you know, like there are awkward vibes happening now, but nobody would say like there are cringe, there's cringeness happening. It's usually tied to a particular actor. Yeah.

and their behavior. That's what I mean. This is true. This is true. Something is cringe that somebody did or somebody is cringe. Yeah, somebody is, but nobody is cringe just essentially. They are cringe by virtue of what they do or say. Okay, true. Maybe that's, yeah, like what are people other than what they do or say? Fair enough. But in her book, Plakias also talks about how

When we describe something as cringe or as cringeworthy, there is...

a sense of pity and contempt that goes along with that judgment that makes it much more aggressive than just the recognition that maybe a situation or an interaction was awkward. And it just reminds me of like the quintessential awkward situation that she talks about, which is when you're walking on the sidewalk and you're running to somebody and you're both trying to like cross each other, but you keep moving to the same side of the sidewalk, right? Like that's not

cringe that's just awkward it's a little bit off tempo or out of sync in terms of your interactions with other people my actual least favorite is when you turn onto a street and you just happen to be going at the exact same pace as somebody else and so you're effectively walking next to each other and your pace is not sufficiently different for one person to suddenly outpace another so awkward um

So we're going to come back to Plagueis' argument that people can't be awkward when we interview her. I want to touch on another element of this study that was done, which had to do with the topics of conversation that people find awkward. So David, tell us what topics people reported feeling awkwardness around.

Yeah, so some of these are really, really funny because, and I'm surprised that some of them were rated low on the awkwardness scale, but one that I really like is clogging a toilet. You go to somebody's house at a party, you clog the toilet, and then

you don't know what to do. Do you pretend like it was already clogged when you got there and you feign shock and dismay? Or do you just own it and you have to tell the host, I just clogged your toilet? This isn't quite the same thing, but one time I found myself in a really awkward situation of getting coffee with a colleague at a coffee shop that was really close to my house, but that didn't have a bathroom. And it was my first time meeting him.

And he was like, oh, I live on the other side of town. Like it sucks there's no bathroom here. You know, I have an hour long drive. And so I found myself in the position of being like, do I invite him into my home to use my restroom or not? This is the first time I've met him and my bathroom wasn't very clean. So I literally was like, well, I shouldn't just not let him use the bathroom because I'm feeling uncomfortable. So I told him to look at my bookshelves while I like, quote unquote, use the bathroom first, which really just meant me like rapidly cleaning the toilet.

And that's when you clog the toilet yourself. Yeah.

But some of these other topics are equally good, like watching a scene, a sex scene in a movie with a parent or accidentally sending a gossiping message to a subject of the gossip. So those were rated the two most awkward situations. And I think that is like very true. I also know somebody who accidentally sexted their mom one time, which like is one of the most awkward possible things I could ever...

So that's accidentally sending a message. Oh my gosh. But it's not a gossipy message to the subject of the gossip. Ellie, I did that. I did that in grad school to my stepfather. No, to my stepfather. Oh my God, that's so much worse. Yes, because I went on a date who had his first name. No. They shared a first name and so I texted and it was horrific. Was it flirtatious or sexual?

No, it was sexual. Thankfully, the particular sexual expression that I used, I could, like, I used my skills as an improviser to save myself. And I made it seem as if I had meant to send that to somebody with whom I was playing video games. And it worked in the context of the discussion. But I sexted my stepfather. Wow.

Okay, good thing your stepfather does not listen to Overthink or else he would be disabused of the impression that it was about a video game. Oh my god, so horrific. Forgetting someone's name is rated pretty awkward. So most people didn't rate that as extremely awkward, but they rated it as like a 7 to 9 on the scale out of 10. So I think that's probably, you know, that's right. You said that

you were surprised at some of the topics that people didn't find that awkward. What are you referring to? So the one that is the last on their rating system, which I think is extremely awkward and is very similar structurally to your turning the corner and walking in the same direction, it's saying goodbye to somebody and then realizing that you're both headed in the same direction. And that's pretty

Yeah, do you like take back the goodbye? You're like, I hereby retract my adieu. The majority of participants rated that as either not at all awkward or one to three. I feel like that's definitely a four or five.

Yeah, the one that I don't think is awkward at all that some people said was awkward is accidentally liking somebody's old photo or post on social media. I don't think that's awkward at all. I'm just like giving likes left and right on social profiles. Oh.

Oh my gosh, you're not ashamed about creeping to somebody's photo from 2018? No, it's like, you were eight in this picture? Like. Oh my God. Okay, we also cannot not mention one that is rated toward the middle in the awkwardness scale, which is listening to a recording of your own voice. Because, David, this is something you and I have to do all the time.

Well, and you know how I feel about this, Ellie. You feel like it's awkward. You don't like it. Yeah, like I've never listened to a single Overthink episode after it's been published. I listened to them during the editing, but I never listened to them after the fact. I cannot. Why would you listen? Okay, so we have to listen to the final cut. Why would you listen to it

after that point, like just for fun, of course you're not doing that. I would never do that either. No, but I've been on like road trips when friends are like, oh, should we listen to an episode of Overthink? Because David is here and I'm like, absolutely fucking not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I will say, but in terms of actual just sheer awkwardness of listening to your own voice, that is something I have definitely gotten over. I used to feel like it was kind of awkward, but now, at least when it comes to the podcast, I feel like I'm just totally dissociated. Yeah.

I don't know if I'm using that term in the technical, you know, sense, but like I've dissociated my subjectivity from my own voice. I love that you're like, I hate the sound of my voice that as soon as I listen to it, I full on dissociate. Well, actually, it really depends. Sometimes it's not so bad. Sometimes I'm like, OK, I'm talking to my own minute and using like way too much. Alexandra Plakias is associate professor of philosophy at Hamilton College.

She works on issues in moral psychology and social epistemology and has published on topics including disgust, self-confidence, moral disagreement, and the philosophy of food. She's also the author of the book Awkwardness, a Theory. Hi, welcome to Overthink. Hi, Alex. Hi, thanks for having me.

We are so excited to do this episode with you. Reading your book was a real joy, and I feel like obviously such a timely topic. And one of the things that I appreciated about this is that, you know, as philosophers, we often are in positions to be able to analyze phenomena that on a day-to-day basis, we kind of know it when we see it or we can recognize, but we lack the understanding of what

what the phenomenon actually is, right? As philosophers, we can be like, this is how you know it when you see it. Like, these are the necessary and sufficient conditions, or these are like the features in ordinary language that we are implicitly working with when we're using a concept. And you do that in this book with the word object.

awkwardness. We've all experienced awkwardness, but you point out that there's not a lot of literature on the topic. So tell us what exactly awkwardness is on your view.

So it's true. There's very little analytic philosophy work on awkwardness and very little moral psychology work on awkwardness. And that was something that surprised me when I came to the topic. There is a book by a scholar, Adam Kotzko, on awkwardness. And there's some work in psychology specifically on awkwardness. But most work that I came across treated awkwardness as kind of a symptom or characteristic of embarrassment.

Part of what I want to do in the book is show what awkwardness isn't. So I don't think it's just a subtype of embarrassment. I actually think awkwardness, embarrassment, and shame are importantly different. And understanding why is important for how we experience awkwardness and how we go about addressing it. I also don't think awkwardness is something that is just a property or a trait of an individual, even though we often describe ourselves as awkward.

I think awkwardness is something that kind of comes out of social interactions, right? So like, you know, the tagline would be like, people aren't awkward, situations are awkward, right? And situations get awkward when we lack a social script to guide us through a situation.

And when I talk about social scripts, you know, this is a concept that gets used in various ways throughout the literature. And some people use it really expansively. And then there are kind of narrow technical meanings. But really what I mean is just like that set of social, of cognitive, um,

and social resources that help us understand what's going on in a situation, how we classify a situation, how we understand our role in it, what norms we think are in play in a situation. And the thing about scripts is like, just as if I were giving a performance in a theater, I need to be on the same page as the other actors to enact a social script. Like I need to coordinate with other people, but so much of that coordination happens in this kind of unspoken, implicit, and maybe unconscious way that we're,

only aware of it when it starts to break down and then the result is awkwardness and then we become so painfully aware of it, right?

Yeah, no, and I remember in your book, you talk about the etymology of the term and you associated with being unable to navigate a space intelligently. Like it's not that you have the wrong map for traversing space. It's that you don't have a map at all. And so you're just kind of looking around unsure of what to do. And so it's clear that on your account, awkwardness emerges in social situations, right? It's a property of social settings where we don't have a clear script to follow, as you suggest.

And the fear that we all can relate to of being that awkward person or creating an awkward situation is so intense that it can sometimes cause us to simply avoid certain topics if we as a society don't have clear norms for broaching them, for talking about them. And you mentioned death, illness, and money as topics that fall into this bucket of things that are awkward to talk about. And as a result, we don't talk about them.

And yet we know that these are important elements of our lives, right? They are key to our flourishing as social creatures, as family members, as members of a community, so on and so forth. And so being silent about them for fear of being awkward is really unfortunate.

And so I want to ask you if there is any way around this particular problem. So what should we do in connection to these topics? Should we develop new social scripts? Should we avoid those topics? Should we just confront the awkwardness? Should we keep quiet? What's your view on this?

Yes, all of the things, right? I think this is part of what's hard is there's no single answer here. And I think as a philosopher, part of what made this topic challenging is that there's so many ways for a situation to become awkward. There's so many kinds of situations that can become awkward. It sometimes feels like the miracle is how anything is ever not awkward, right? So as far as your

question, how do we deal with this? How do we manage these topics? I think that one strategy is to kind of consciously decide on a script or to kind of decide going into an interaction how we're going to handle it. And sometimes that very literally means having a kind of script. And I do think one reason that certain topics like death, for example, which you mentioned, or illness have become awkward is that we...

For a long time, we're kind of all on the same page with certain rituals and institutions that governed how we deal with topics like death. So I'm thinking here of like religious institutions. It's not that we don't have religious institutions anymore, but it's that we have, you know, much more diversity in the kinds of religious institutions that people belong to or some people don't belong to any right now.

That's good. It's great that people have more choice about the social roles and identities that they adopt, but it does mean that we can't take for granted that people are going to be on the same page as us. And it means that sometimes we feel uncertain about what the right ritual is going into a situation, or we just realize we don't actually have a ritual for this kind of situation.

So I think one strategy we can use, as I said, is to decide in advance on a kind of script, right? So I might think going into something like, here's what I'm going to say, and here's how this is going to help me negotiate it. I think another way is to be aware that there's more than one person involved in the situation. And I think this is a place where we can negotiate.

become more aware of our role in the situation and what our goal is. And that can help us navigate a situation. So I'm thinking here about death, which I know can feel awkward for people, how to broach the topic of a death, how to offer condolences, how to talk to someone who might be grieving. And we sometimes feel like we don't know what to say. But if we think about like, well, what's

you know, what is the goal of this interaction, right? Am I trying to kind of come off and make sure I say exactly the right thing? Or am I trying to connect with this person in a difficult time for them and offer them some comfort? Sometimes focusing on the goal of an interaction can help us get through it. I think another thing is to, as the person maybe who is feeling less prone to awkwardness in a certain kind of situation, especially situations involving money, which

which often also involve power, we can kind of help people not feel awkward, right? By broaching the topic so that they don't have to. So for example, you know, as academics, we're often asked to give talks or give seminars or participate in events. And a lot of times money is never mentioned. Like, is there going to be money? Is there not going to be money? Right?

that puts someone in a situation where they might have to ask about money and that might feel really awkward because I think we also have this assumption as academics that like of course we're not in it for the money we're in it for the love of philosophy right which is sometimes true so we have these weird conflicting scripts about why we're doing things and I think that putting someone in a situation where they have to navigate that conversation and bring up the topic of money when

When they are, you know, perhaps the more junior person or the less empowered person, one way to avoid that is to simply bring it up up front, right?

Right. Or to simply acknowledge, like, I don't know how to have this conversation. I realize this is difficult because I don't want to make it seem like I'm only interested in money, but money is also important. Right. I don't know the best way to talk about illness, but I want to be able to help if I can. You know, what are some things that I can do here and things like that? And I think also I think one thing awkwardness is.

highlights is we often expect social interactions to be effortless. And we really kind of think it's something that we're supposed to know going into it. But I think once we acknowledge that, like, this stuff is really hard, not everyone knows how to talk about death or illness or money or periods or menopause, right? And we just kind of acknowledge that, that this is difficult. It's okay to have to do research.

it's okay to ask people, like, what should I say in this situation? So I had a work situation recently where I had to navigate a kind of tricky interaction and I was really wondering how to do it. And then it occurred to me to ask someone, a kind of non-academic, how would you do this? And they just gave me a sentence. And it was like, all I needed was that one sentence that kind of threaded the needle between like, I see what you're doing here and it's a problem. And also like,

I don't want to offend you and I don't want to blow this up into something bigger. Sometimes just literally having that one line can be so helpful. But as long as we're under the impression that like this is somehow supposed to be this magical, effortless skill that we all have, we don't necessarily feel comfortable or OK asking for those resources or asking for help like that.

Mm-hmm. And I want to just pick up on that word comfortable that you just used, because one of the things that you talk about in the book is that even though awkwardness is a property of social relations, not a feeling, and you really make a case for that, you do say that

awkwardness is often accompanied by certain feelings. And you name discomfort, uncertainty, and self-consciousness as the three emotions or feelings that often come up in relation to awkward situations. And I found that a really useful framework because I think

It is so common to refer to oneself as an awkward person. And because on your account, that doesn't really work, the situation is awkward, we need to offer some way of describing what people are getting at when they say that they're an awkward person. And it seems like...

a proneness to those types of feelings might be one. You also talk about how even though there aren't any awkward people, there are people who occupy liminal social roles and or who find social cues difficult. And I think, you know, the latter especially pertains to situations of neurodivergence. So I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit more about what the role of feelings is here and how you think certain people might be predisposed to the role

feelings themselves and or to the situations that generate those feelings? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. So one reason that I object to

the description of someone as an awkward person is I think it's actually interestingly ambiguous. So if I say like, Ellie is really awkward at parties, it seems like one thing I might mean is like, Ellie feels really awkward at parties. But another thing I might mean is Ellie makes me feel awkward at parties, right? And I think that no one ever. I

I think that ambiguity can be really problematic, right? So sometimes describing someone as awkward, right, means like they make me feel uncomfortable and it can be a way of kind of distancing ourselves from them or expressing a desire not to really have them around. And so I think those feelings of discomfort, you know, there's,

there's kind of a small but growing literature on discomfort itself and the use of discomfort as kind of a moral tool. But I think that when we talk about our own discomfort, it's important to recognize where that's coming from and what the source of that is. And I think describing people as awkward can be a way of pinning our discomfort on them when it might be that we don't really know how to navigate the situation, right? We don't really know how to talk to this person or how to approach the difficulty they're dealing with or something like that. And that seems...

really useful as a way of thinking about, for instance, a neurotypical person who's in a relationship with somebody who has an autism diagnosis. Oftentimes, like,

When somebody is in a close relationship with somebody who has an autism diagnosis, but they don't have it themselves, what might seem like awkward situations from the outside suddenly don't seem awkward at all because you learn how to navigate that social situation, you know, due to new scripts that don't match dominant scripts. And so I think that idea that sometimes neurotypical people or whatever we call quote unquote neurotypical people,

Feeling awkward around folks who are not neurotypical, that has more to do with the neurotypical person feeling awkward than it does with the neurodivergent person or a person with an autism diagnosis. And the example I'm using here, feeling awkward, I think helps to sort of shift who we see as quote unquote responsible for the awkwardness and who sort of bears the burden of that discomfort. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And I think it also brings out exactly how much we take for granted about the kind of social infrastructure around us. Right. So, you know, I was thinking about the example of just like walking into a room and you just kind of know where the light switches and you reach for it. And for most of us, it's like there and it's like at the right height and we don't really have to think about it or work to get to it. Right. And a lot of social cues are like that. They've just always been at hand for us. They're always in roughly the same place. They're there for

when we look for them. When we engage in an interaction with someone who maybe isn't reading our social cues the way we would expect them to, or isn't giving back the kind of social cues we would expect, right? The kind of eye contact, the kind of nods or smiles or gestures, that can be disorienting for us. But that kind of disorientation can also remind us how reliant we are on a certain kind of infrastructure

navigate. I mentioned earlier a book by Adam Kotzko also called Awkwardness, which is potentially a little awkward. Awkward. He has this phrase that I really like where he talks about this idea of insight through social breakdown, right? And that, yeah, it's when there's like this social breakdown in interactions that we can kind of realize like a lot of what's normally going on there in the background that we don't see or we're not aware of. And that can also help us rewrite those scripts in ways that make them more accessible to others.

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Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you there. See you then. Yeah, and this notion of breakdown is really interesting because it makes me now think about how much work goes into situations before they quote unquote break down and how we have the expectation that the people that we consider to be awkward,

do a lot of work not to make us feel awkward. So I'm here thinking about the person with an autism diagnosis being expected to sort of go out of their way and adapt their behavior and their compartment to the norms of quote unquote neurotypical individuals. Or, you know, something that happened to me when I was younger, I remember because I was the young gay kid who played a lot of sports, I always felt awkward in the gym room. And I felt a pressure to do the emotional work

of making sure that other people weren't uncomfortable around me by constantly giving them indicators that I was not being awkward. Like, I'm not looking below your neck. Like, yes, you know, yeah, exactly. It's like, I'm just weirdly showering the whole time staring at the ceiling. This is totally normal. And so there is here a question of the distribution of emotional work. And it makes me think of a part of your book where you talk about

the concept of accountability. And so I want to ask you about that because you also talk in connection, for instance, to the Me Too movement, that when some of these discussions, especially around sexuality, sexual harassment, sexual violence,

Because we feel those discussions as awkward, we often decide not to broach them at all. And I'm here also thinking about the bro code, right? Because it's awkward to talk to your bro about the fact that what they said was sexist. And so the result is a lot of unaccountability.

And so I want to hear your thoughts on this connection between awkwardness, power, and accountability. Yeah, great question. And that was something that really struck me was coming across these interviews with men where they would say, like, I knew what my colleague was doing wasn't cool, but I felt really awkward talking about it, right? Yeah.

I think part of this goes back to this concept of like liminality. And a lot of times when we think about things like sexual harassment or when we think about things like, yeah, kind of problematic behavior, we have these kind of examples that really stand out as like at the extreme case or a very clear cut case, you know. And I think that sometimes in real life when we encounter these concepts,

kinds of situations, it's less clear cut. Like, I know this is problematic in some way, but does it rise to this level? Or is it something that like, I should go through official channels on? Or do I have to say something, right? Maybe it's okay. And I think

Where that kind of uncertainty is, there's a lot of room for awkwardness because we're not necessarily sure whether we have an obligation to handle it, how we should handle it, whether it falls cleanly into this category. And, you know, I was also...

reading some accounts of sexual harassment in philosophy departments. And one thing people would say is like, the fact that everyone else seemed to kind of know about this, but like not be doing anything made me doubt myself. And then I started to wonder like, is this really problematic? Is this just happening?

how it is. Is this something that everyone else understands and I don't, right? So again, this expectation that like, well, if I'm not sure, then it must be that everyone else knows something and I don't know it because, you know, and as opposed to just kind of asking explicitly this assumption, I think that that runs in the background that, you know, this stuff is supposed to be effortless. You're supposed to know it without asking, I think really can be a hindrance here.

there's interesting literature on people with disabilities and the way we interact with people with disabilities. And there's some studies on how people feel awkward during those interactions. And one of the things the researchers recommend is like, yeah, people with disabilities should call attention to the disability early on in the interaction because it'll make other people feel less awkward. And when I read that, I was really struck. And what you said, David, reminded me of that, that like, there's this extra work you're doing going into every interaction to figure out like, okay, I'm going to do

I'm going to put this out there. When am I going to fit this into the interaction? How am I going to call attention to it? Now this person is at ease and we can just have a non-awkward interaction in a way that most of us would just take for granted and not feel the need to do.

Yeah, and this unevenness of who's doing the work of calling attention is something I'd love for us to come back to a bit later in the conversation. But for now, I want to just rest for a moment on this idea of things we bring up and things we don't just in general. And I'll just say, like, personally speaking, I think...

I am somebody whose family inculcated the virtue of that sort of effortlessness in social situations. My parents are both very much social butterflies. My sister and I early on were taught like, here's how you talk to people. And so I think we have a pretty easy time talking to strangers and in a variety of social situations. But it also means sometimes I find myself like

awkwardly calling attention to too many things. Like maybe I shouldn't make certain things explicit that I do because I just feel like too comfortable in the situation and that can then make other people feel awkward. And I wonder how you're thinking about something like awkward silence, just in a really pedestrian way. Because one of the things I loved about your book is talking about how there's this real double-edged sword with awkwardness where it can actually, in the aim to keep things effortless,

we can end up keeping silent about things that we shouldn't keep silent about. So I think, you know, your exchange with David just really drove that home. But there's also this more kind of pedestrian notion of silence of just like, yeah, no, it was awkward that you brought that up and you shouldn't have. And or like,

This silence is really awkward. Yeah. I mean, silence is interesting because one reason silence can be so awkward is we're not sure what it means, right? Like a silence can just mean so many different things. It's ambiguous. So I think that also just right there opens up the possibility for a lot of awkwardness, right? But I was also thinking about awkward silence as kind of a way of

maybe letting someone know or calling attention to something someone might have said that's problematic without explicitly calling them out on it. So I'm thinking of like a situation where, you know, hypothetically, there's like a senior guest speaker at a dinner with graduate students and they make kind of a

problematic, gross, sexist joke, right? Now, the graduate students might not, might, maybe, they might not feel comfortable saying that was gross and sexist. But if nobody laughs and you kind of stay silent and the joke just hangs there, right, that can also be a way of, like, making it really clear that, like, we don't find your joke funny. This moment is going to be really salient to everyone, right? Mm-hmm.

And it is a kind of rejection of the joke without having to say, you know, for one person to put themselves out there and say like that was inappropriate and unacceptable. You know, in a perfect world, everyone would feel comfortable saying that in that situation. But the reality is that power imbalances and asymmetries mean that people don't always feel comfortable speaking up in those situations. And so sometimes silence can be a powerful tool. And I think it can also make people a

maybe. So say that you're, you know, in the case you described during an interaction with someone and you call attention to something and then realize like, Oh, that was really awkward. Right. One way that person might make you realize that was kind of awkward is if they just kind of don't respond for, it doesn't have to be long, right? That extra little beat. We are so,

exquisitely painfully sensitive to like conversational timing eye contact all of these things that even just a few extra milliseconds can be a way of signaling yeah you kind of overstepped a little bit there

I mean, that also assumes, though, that the other person cares, right? And so I think that, you know, awkwardness is potentially powerful, but its power depends on us caring about what other people think, right? Or caring about the opinions of others or being invested in social relationships. I do think sometimes...

Maybe there are situations that we feel like just should be awkward. And the answer isn't, you know, as much as I think sometimes it's good to be explicit and to negotiate social scripts. I do think sometimes it's also okay to leave things a little awkward. So, you know, one thing I was thinking about in writing the book is like,

yeah, there are conversations I don't necessarily want to have with the chair of my department or my mom, right? And it's okay if that's awkward. And it lets you know where maybe you bumped up against a boundary. Now, Alex, I want to go to the last chapter of your book, which is entitled The Importance of Being Awkward. I appreciate the nod to Oscar Wilde here. And in it, you mentioned some

practical, concrete ways that we can change our relationship to awkwardness for the better. Although you do begin by pointing out that, you know, awkwardness, much like silence, is fundamentally ambivalent. You're not saying that it's good or that it's bad. It's just that you're trying to give us a map for navigating the awkwardness of awkwardness itself.

And for example, you mentioned that one of the things that we definitely need to begin doing in connection to awkward circumstances is avoid pinning them on individuals. And this goes back to that earlier discussion that we had about there being no awkward individuals, only awkward social relations and situations. And by the way, I thought that was extremely compelling, even though in the past I have thought individually.

Either that I am awkward or that I know people who are fundamentally or inherently awkward. And so your book has shifted my view on that point. But you also talk about another strategy, and that's the one that I want to ask you to reflect upon here.

And that is what you call the art of social improvisation, that sometimes in awkward situations, we just need to hone in that skill that so many stand-up comedians have, which is to respond in witty ways.

ways in flexible ways on this spot to situations that we start to see are snowballing into awkwardness. And so my question for you is, what is the role of improv in connection to awkwardness?

Right. So I think that actually a lot of our social interactions involve some degree of improv. And, you know, part of improv is just kind of getting people to go along with it. Right. You mentioned a kind of witty comment or something like that. I mean, laughter is actually an interesting tool we can use to diffuse awkwardness, partly

because like when you're really genuinely laughing right you kind of are not in control like you just give yourself over to this thing and it's something that we can do in sync and that just kind of like happens and carries us along and breaks the tension but I think that if awkwardness is the result of not knowing what social script or following not having a social script to guide us then we're

Getting out of awkwardness requires getting onto a script. And one way we can do that is improv-ing, right? So if you think about the literal act of improv, I might start by acting like I'm driving a car, right? And then it's like, I've set up this thing. I'm driving a car. And I think we can use social cues to do that too, right? So we can use social cues, whether subtle or quite explicit, to suggest, let's have it be this kind of situation, right?

Let's have it be like this. And I think sometimes we try to do it in a more subtle way, and that requires other people picking up on it and going along with it, right? And I think we have various words for this kind of skill. Sometimes we talk about people who have tact or social grace, who can kind of sense when a situation is falling apart and get everyone on board with it. I think a really interesting question is why some people seem to

be able to get other people to go along better than others. And I think this might be related to things like charisma, which I think is a really interesting kind of question. Like, what is it to have charisma? But I think part of it is like when you start an improv, people just want to like get in on it, right? People just want to go along.

along with it and follow you. And I think we know people who can kind of spontaneously generate social cohesion. And like, this kind of goes back to the question of who we see as able to call the shots in a social situation and who we see as responsible for kind of like following along. One reason I think we need to lean into awkwardness or at least to learn to deal with awkwardness is that I think insofar as our social scripts

are going to be always changing and evolving, we're inevitably going to run into awkwardness. You know, I think that we often think like these, we have, this is a really awkward time. We are in awkward times right now. But I think people have thought that for a while. And I think it's just always going to be true because our social scripts will always be evolving. Our roles will always be changing. And so I think if nothing else, we have to accept the inevitability of awkwardness and just kind of learn how to deal with it.

I love that. And I love this idea of improv as a former improv girl myself. Oh, interesting. Which I will say, I think my background in improvisational comedy has majorly helped me create social cohesion in the classroom. So what you just said, I think really resonated with me. But I think too, in terms of these kind of changing social scripts, one thing that you really compellingly point out is that, you know,

In addition to these cases where spontaneous strategies such as improvisation are needed, there are also cases where there are scripts that are becoming more and more explicit. And one of those cases is talking about pronouns in our society. You use the example of pronouns.

to identify a way that this new emerging script, for instance, starting a class by saying, I use she, her pronouns and asking other people to state their pronouns is new, but it also is bringing to the fore invisible work that has always already been done by us, right? When we're not explicitly stating our pronouns, we are asking other people to implicitly know what our pronouns are based on our presentation.

And, you know, nowadays people are increasingly questioning that with the rise in visibility of non-binary or gender fluid or trans identities. And so you talk about how what might feel like a new additional burden for people whose pronouns match their gender presentation actually is just a shifting of the burden onto us from a

other people who might, you know, if there weren't attention to pronouns being drawn, have to share their pronouns without being asked or have to make complicated risk assessments in choosing what bathroom to choose. And it sort of reminded me of my own work on hermeneutic labor, which is this labor of interpreting one's own and others' feelings. I think what you're talking about here does have to do with feelings, but, you know, not entirely. But so

Who are we expecting to sort of do that work? And how can the rise of awkward situations reveal to us that it's not just the new addition of work in general, it's just the shifting of the burden of work from one party to another due to the uncertainty of social scripts?

Right, yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. I think you're right to point out that that work has always been there, the work of interpreting a social situation, the work of classifying it. One thing that I think is interesting about awkwardness, and I think if I'm not mistaken, you've talked about the way in which that work

work is often gendered and that women are often responsible for doing that work. And I think one thing awkwardness brings out that's interesting is like, we can do all that work and we can come up with an interpretation that we like, but we're also dependent on other people to go along with it. And so there's kind of two sources of labor here, or there's kind of two issues. One is like, who's going to do the labor? And the other is who gets to control how the situation ultimately plays out. And so in the book, you know, at one point I talk about

awkwardness as a kind of social flex, right? And the way in which like certain people, and in particular, I use the example of like, you know, white male billionaire tech bros, well, you know, can get away with being awkward and can kind of have this option of, you know, not caring whether or not a situation is awkward. And I think that really highlights the way in which awkwardness intersects with power and who's responsible for making situations not awkward and

And who gets to just kind of like create some awkwardness and walk away and not worry about it? You know, I think the other issue here is that when social discomfort arises, we often see women as responsible for everything.

ensuring people's social comfort or smoothing over any discomfort that might arise. I think also we sometimes see people who we might perceive as different or as new to a kind of situation or role as responsible for creating awkwardness. So the feminist critic, Sarah Ahmed has this line, which I'm going to paraphrase. I can't remember the exact quote, but she basically says the person who calls out the awkwardness is held accountable for creating

creating the awkwardness. And I'm thinking here about like situations, which, you know, at least when I was starting out in philosophy, often philosophy spaces were like largely male spaces. And there would sometimes be this vibe of like, well, now we can't tell that joke because it would be awkward because there are like women here. Right. And it's sort of like, well, that's not why you can't tell the joke. Right. I,

But it feels like, yeah, it's seen as like this person's presence is making things awkward for other people. And especially where we have these gendered expectations of like, well, you're a woman, you should be making everyone feel comfortable, right? So I think, yeah, there is this tendency. And this is, again, why I think we should be very hesitant to describe people as awkward because awkward as a descriptor is more naturally going to attach itself either to certain individuals or certain positions more than others. Yeah.

Alex, you have given us a lot to think about and mull over. And I'm glad to report this conversation was not awkward at all. It was very smooth, a lot of social cohesion, perfect social scaffolding. So we thank you and we recommend your book to all of our listeners out there. Highly recommend it. Such a fun and interesting, compelling read. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's been great talking to you. Thank you.

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Ellie, that was such an interesting discussion about a concept that, you know, appears all over the place. And it's a really good example of what philosophy can do for illuminating our everyday experience. Yeah, this was such an automatic yes episode for us. When we found out about this book, I instantly was like, will you be on the podcast, please?

please. Yeah, no. And so it was a great discussion. And I want to ask you as we begin here to wrap things up, what you thought about specifically her claim that in the past people have always said, oh, we live in such awkward times. And nowadays people also say that. Do you think that we really do live in more awkward than normal times? Or is this just another version of people always thinking that their historical moment is unique? Yeah.

Who knows? Honestly, I can't say for certain whether we live in more awkward times than in other phases, but I do think there are a few things that make our society today ripe for awkward situations. And one of the examples that we talked about is a lot of variability in gender norms that we're witnessing today, including the rise of asking people what their pronouns are. Now, I think...

Asking people what their pronouns are seems like a very easy way to alleviate potentially awkward situations and awkward, not just like in a slightly uncomfortable sense, but like very morally problematic sense, right? People don't want to be misgendered and I don't want to be misgendering other people. She has a really interesting quote from Life magazine in 1927 at the beginning of the book that is shockingly similar to today's situation, though.

The quote reads, So this 27 quote is about somebody who isn't sure, a tea shop waitress who isn't sure whether the patron is male or female, probably due to the kind of ambiguity and gender fluidity of the 1920s with flapper culture. Yeah.

Yeah, and if it was already happening in the 1920s, then maybe it's not something that we can say is new because you could imagine, you know, it having been awkward when women started wearing pants or, you know, when women started entering the workforce. So whenever there are any changes to women,

the distribution of social roles along the lines of gender and sex that people would experience those kind of like unclear circumstances as awkward. So I kind of lean toward the theory that there is nothing unique about our era that makes it any more ripe for awkwardness. I think social life just is ripe for awkwardness. And there might be

might be something about our current moment that actually obviates the continued potential awkwardness of that situation. Because I doubt that the tea shop waitress in 1927 saying, sir, ma'am, sir, ended up asking the patron what their pronouns are, right? And probably today, a stranger still wouldn't do that. But there are a lot of situations when we are asking each other what our pronouns are. And so that can obviate that potential awkwardness. And Plakias uses the example of Zoom meetings or Zoom classes, where

where people can write their names and their pronouns in. And so you can just have like your names and pronouns listed along with your video screen. Well, and in the spirit now of playing devil's advocate to my own position from literally five seconds ago, I wonder whether moving away from gender a little bit, whether technology might be a catalyst for awkwardness because as in the case of, you know, sexting a family member,

True, yes!

the drama with Miley Cyrus. Now back to this lady who had a lot to say about me on social media the other day, where once you're in person, I don't know this. Yeah. She said that I'd like at an award ceremony while she was receiving the award. And she's like, you said all these things online. That's fine. I am here now in person. Can you back them up? And so that transition from the digital to, to,

quote unquote, real life can be awkward because the same norms don't apply to interactions in those domains. I also am really glad you bring up this example, which I wasn't aware of, because it brings to mind something that I was thinking about in reading this book, which is that white culture is more awkward than Black culture. Oh, just because of like...

Protestant values about being proper and not addressing uncomfortable topics of discussion. Yeah, I know this sounds like a ridiculously broad, like, generalization, and sure it is, but this is something that there's actually a lot of sociological research done on. The fact that Black American culture tends to be more confrontational and also reparative. So there's a way that mainstream white culture is, like, afraid of

of saying something that's going to be awkward, whether it's the bro code that you mentioned earlier or like white feminine norms around politeness. So there's like a real non-confrontational dimension there. Whereas I think Black American culture is much more comfortable on the whole with confrontation and also with the sort of

results that can emerge from that, like this sort of restorative justice approach. And it reminds me of some of what Plakias says about needing to feel more comfortable than we might ordinarily in critiquing friends and in recognizing

Recognizing that critiquing friends is not a sheer matter of blame or reprobation, but it actually is a way of calling people in, right? So this calling in culture, too, and call out culture, both of those, I think, are more associated with Black social norms than with dominant white social norms.

Yeah. And I mean, in connection to that notion of calling in, it reminds me of the part of her book where she talks about the association between awkwardness and the Greek root oikos, which means home. And she says that we feel awkward when we don't feel at home.

When we don't feel comfortable, when we don't feel safe, and when we don't know, again, how to navigate a particular situation. And so in those cases, a culture that is much more explicit about tension or about ambiguity and also committed to the work of reparation would be better poised to deal with situations of awkwardness and would make people feel more at home.

in their own skin and in the world precisely when those inevitable moments of misunderstanding pop up.

At risk of making the end of this episode awkward, I just want to quickly remind all of you listeners that we do have our Patreon where we have monthly Zooms and also bonus segments. So David, I really want to do a deep dive on an awkward scene from The Office with you in our Patreon segment. If you're a patron, stay tuned. If you're not, consider supporting us as an independent, self-supporting show that really needs money to keep sustaining us. Oh my God. Not to mention something awkward.

I know you just made the money talk a little awkward. You guys are invited to this discussion if you give us money. Awkward.

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