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.

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”

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

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.

Awkwardness is essentially social: it emerges when the scripts we rely on to guide our social interactions fail us, either because they don’t exist or we’re unable to access or implement them.

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

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

Scripts are tools for social coordination: they function only if they’re shared and accepted by sufficiently many members of the relevant group.