Awkwardness: A Theory

Awkwardness is a property that characterizes social situations or interactions when one or more participant(s) finds themselves lacking the guidance of a script and feels awkward as a result.

What’s special about social scripts is their interpersonal, coordinative function: they help us figure out not only what we should do, but how to make sense of other people’s behaviors, intentions, and roles.

We tend to focus on norm violations, but the absence of normative guidance can have just as significant an impact on our social lives.

Awkwardness draws attention to what are usually automatic or unreflective behaviors; this, in turn, gives rise to increased self-monitoring.

The rules of etiquette reduce the cognitive burden of everyday life; because of them, in social situations, “the work of deciding what to do happens elsewhere”

scripts are better understood not as guiding individual behavior, but as coordinating group behavior.

rudeness acknowledges etiquette even as it refuses to comply.5 Awkwardness doesn’t. Someone who makes things awkward isn’t being defiant; they can’t defy the rules, because they don’t “have” them.

unfamiliar norms are more salient—and more effortful to follow.

the puzzle is less about how things become awkward than about how things are ever not awkward. Our reliance on infrastructure is most evident when that infrastructure fails.