Empathy-Neglect in Embarrassment-Avoidance: Observations from an Outsider

As consumers, we often forgo opportunities to help ourselves and others in order to avoid embarrassment. Our fear of embarrassment prevents us from admitting we do not know how a product works such as a mortgage or birth control, and from asking advice about what we should do such as our mounting mortgage bills and unplanned pregnancies. In many cases, if we are to help ourselves and others, we must overcome our fear of embarrassment. This research offers advice on how to curb consumers’ embarrassment avoidant behavior. Recent research should bring comfort to those who worry about others witnessing our embarrassing blunders. First, our blunders of ten go unnoticed by others (Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky 2000). Nevertheless, we overestimate how much others pay attention to us; a tendency termed the ‘spotlight effect’. Second, when others do notice our embarrassing blunders, they tend to make kinder judgments than we expect (Savitsky, Epley, and Gilovich 2001). Still, we fail to take others’ empathy into account, a tendency termed ‘empathy-neglect’ (Epley, Savitsky, and Gilovich 2002). Both of these tendencies—the spotlight effect and empathy-neglect—underlie embarrassment-avoidance. However, no studies to date have examined how these two factors interact to increase or decrease embarrassment avoidance.