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Awkwardness
Awkwardness
A Theory
ALEXANDRA PLAKIAS
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2024
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Plakias, Alexandra, author.
Title: Awkwardness : a theory / by Alexandra Plakias.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford Uiversity Press, [2024] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Contents: Introduction—This is Awkward—Feeling Awkward—
Awkward, Socially—Morally Awkward Problems—Awkward Silence—
The Importance of Being Awkward.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023043048 | ISBN 9780197683606 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780197683637 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197683613 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Clumsiness—Social aspects. | Faux pas. | Social interaction.
Classification: LCC BJ1838 .P53 2024 | DDC 395—dc23/eng/20231107
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043048
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197683606.001.0001
To Douglas
 Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. This Is Awkward
2. Feeling Awkward
3. Awkward, Socially
4. Morally Awkward Problems
5. Awkward Silence
6. The Importance of Being Awkward

Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

Being acknowledged for your contribution to a book about

awkwardness is a dubious honor, so let me clarify that none of the
individuals named here inspired any of the content of the book—the
examples are largely fictional, and where they’re not, the
experiences involved are either hypothetical or my own, unless
specified otherwise.
But the book benefited from conversations with many people, on
a wide-ranging set of topics. Thanks to every single person who
expressed enthusiasm for a book about awkwardness, starting with
Peter Ohlin at Oxford University Press.
Thanks to Dan Kelly and an anonymous reviewer for feedback on
the proposal and an earlier draft of the book, and to John Lawless
for reading chapters and providing suggestions. Audiences at the
Moral Psychology Research Group provided helpful feedback on the
overall argument presented here, and conversations with Aaron
Meskin and two of his wonderful University of Georgia graduate
students, Hannah Raskoski and Marissa “Rissa” Willis, helped inform
my thinking about cringe (and convinced me that it was a term
worth discussing).
I am fortunate to be part of a wonderful, warm, completely non-
awkward department. No thanks to them for the examples in this
book, which I had to come up with on my own. But many thanks to
Justin Clark, Katheryn Doran, Todd Franklin, Marianne Janack,
Russell Marcus, and Alessandro Moscarítolo Palacio for their
encouragement and enthusiasm throughout the project. Justin Clark
pointed me toward helpful sources on the psychology of attunement
and loneliness and the ancient Greek translation of “awkward.” The
Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton College funded preliminary
research for the book, which I conducted alongside my outstanding
student Honor Allen; Honor’s perspective saved me from writing a
much cringier book.
I started working on this book a few months into the COVID-19
pandemic, when leaving the house was a luxury, child care was
nonexistent, and the future was uncertain. There’s something
strange about writing a book about awkwardness when you’re not
interacting with anyone. I was fortunate to have a wonderful support
network in the form of a text-thread with my fellow professor-
parents. Thank you to Cat, Celeste, Erica, Kate, and Jaime; thanks
also to Kendahl for keeping me focused on reality.
I am also lucky enough to have the friendship of the inimitable
and formidable Nina Strohminger, who consistently challenges and
inspires me, and makes me laugh very hard.
My sister Anastasia Plakias has seen me through some of my
most awkward moments. She and my brother-in-law Neil Thompson
have been a constant source of support, encouragement, and
excellent food. I am constantly inspired by my parents and their
fearlessness, curiosity, and sense of adventure. Thank you for
making me brave.
There were many times during the writing of this book when I
doubted that it would come to fruition. My husband, Douglas
Edwards, never did. Thank you for believing in me, for the endless
conversations about awkwardness, and for not making me watch
awkward British comedy with you. And to our kids, Theo and Lola:
you will experience a lot of awkwardness. It’s okay. We all do.
To Douglas
 Introduction

We live in awkward times. We always have: awkwardness is an

inevitable, though perhaps not entirely welcome, part of social
change. Awkwardness is the cost and consequence of our social
nature; it reveals the extent to which being in sync with our social
surroundings matters to us. And it emerges when we have to adjust
our behaviors or attitudes to changing social circumstances.
Sometimes these adjustments are effortless. Sometimes they’re
awkward. We’re told we live in a “golden age of awkwardness,” but
adjustments in social norms and roles have always resulted in
awkward moments. A Life magazine contributor from 1927
bemoans, “These are awkward times, and I sympathize with the
teashop waitress who approached a customer from behind and said
brightly, ‘anything more sir, I mean madam; I beg your pardon sir.’ ”
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. As a result,
we feel awkward: uncertain, uncomfortable, self-conscious. In this
respect, awkwardness is a direct consequence of our social nature.
Our skill at social navigation is mirrored by our aversion to getting
lost.
Appreciating the significance of awkwardness means appreciating
the significance of apparently mundane social encounters more
generally. Throughout the book, I’ll argue that we tend to
underestimate the motivational force of our desires to avoid
experiencing awkward feelings and to avoid being labeled as
awkward. Awkwardness draws our attention to gaps in our social
norms and conventions, highlighting areas of our social life that
often go unnoticed. It’s a kind of normative negative space. So,
while awkwardness often functions to silence and suppress, it can
also be a tool for moral and social progress.
 Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the negative
emotions: anger, anxiety, disgust, envy. A persuasive case has been
made for what Protasi (2021) calls “the wisdom of negative
emotion.” And while it would be natural to try to apply this narrative
here, true to form, awkwardness isn’t a neat fit. That’s partly
because it’s not an emotion (or so I’ll argue in chapter 2), but also
because it’s not clear how much wisdom it has to offer us. Instead,
it’s a sort of warning signal, or diagnostic tool.
Awkwardness is surprisingly underexamined in the scholarly
literature. In his book on humiliation, William Miller remarks of the
titular emotion that while it “figures in the life of almost all scholars,”
it “has itself had virtually no scholarly life” (1993: 132). The same
could well be said of awkwardness.1 There’s a striking discrepancy
between awkwardness’s prominence in our culture and its absence
from the academic literature.
One reason for this, as we’ll see in chapter 2, is that
awkwardness is often confused with or assimilated to its close
relatives, anxiety and embarrassment. But this is a mistake:
awkwardness is importantly different from either of these other
emotions. While anxiety, shame, and embarrassment are similarly
self-conscious, awkwardness gets at our experience of being in the
world in a way these other feelings don’t. It’s about ourselves, but
also about how those selves are seen by others.
This points to a second possible reason for awkwardness’s
academic neglect: it represents a kind of visceral and emotional
discomfort that we, as intellectuals, think we ought to transcend; its
self-conscious concern with social niceties seems rather trivial when
compared to issues of social and global justice, or the nature of truth
and knowledge. Philosophers tend to focus on the big dilemmas, the
virtues, the opportunities for moral greatness—or villainy. It’s only
more recently that we’ve started to appreciate the significance of the
smaller moments of civility—or offense. Awkwardness sits uneasily
alongside these as a way of evaluating our success in the social
world. It’s a form of social dysfunction, dysfluency, and
dysregulation; it’s discomfiting.
 If philosophers have overlooked the topic, perhaps it’s also
because awkwardness, and the idea of social discomfort with which
it’s associated, tends to be associated with a concern for social
conformity and smoothness that seems, frankly, beneath our lofty
moral and intellectual goals. (This may explain why embarrassment
itself is relatively neglected compared to emotions like guilt, shame,
and anxiety.) And one of the points I’ll make in this book is that
awkwardness does work against our ideals: it inhibits moral critique
and conversation, and it prevents us from sharing information that
would help us revise and improve social and moral norms. And it
does so in an unflattering way, by showing how much we care about
conforming to social expectations.
Awkwardness highlights the conflict between our moral
motivations and our desire for social approval and conformity. Part of
what makes awkwardness aversive is that we experience it as a lack
of social attunement, which is also what gives it the power to
influence and silence us: we want to belong, and we don’t want to
mark ourselves out. This need for belonging isn’t something we tend
to celebrate. Our moral heroes are those who dare to stick out and
defy convention; this makes us suspicious of the desire to fit in.
But defying convention comes at a cost, which not everyone can
afford. As we’ll see, working through awkwardness sometimes
requires us to “own it”—to acknowledge the uncertainty, or
ignorance, involved. That takes a certain level of confidence, and it
costs us social currency: admitting that a situation is awkward
involves a loss of face, and we don’t all have face to spare. This is
one way awkwardness can be problematic, and can exacerbate
existing inequities. When we deem people “awkward,” we consign
them to a social status that gives them less access to the social
goods (knowledge, confidence, social esteem) needed to navigate
potentially awkward situations.
So while I think awkwardness has been unfairly neglected, this is
not a redemption story. If anything, it’s the opposite: I’m going to
try to make the case that awkwardness is worse than we think. It’s
not a social triviality, some kind of minor, cosmetic imperfection on
our social facades. Instead, it reveals a way in which we ostracize
and punish those who fail to fit into existing social categories; a way
in which we’re dependent on—and limited by—social scripts and
norms for guidance, and the way in which these frequently let us
down by coming up short when we need them.
That’s not to say awkwardness isn’t funny, silly, trivial, or
sometimes even cute. It’s all these things and more. Figuring out
how that’s possible will take up the first few chapters of the book,
because as we’ll see, awkwardness is hard to pin down. Perhaps
that’s fitting, since at its core, it’s a response to absence: the
absence of social guidance, the absence of a classification.
Being susceptible to awkwardness requires seeing oneself as a
being subject to social norms. To be in an awkward situation is to
realize simultaneously that you lack guidance and that you should
have it; that there’s a kind of knowledge you usually have and
suddenly don’t. Thus, awkwardness requires a kind of social
sophistication, and our vulnerability to it is the flipside of our success
as social creatures.
This book itself is a bit awkward. My goal is to explain
awkwardness and make a case for its philosophical significance,
while also gesturing at some practical implications. Because of the
nature of the subject, the examples range from serious to silly; I
draw on a diverse set of sources. I should also emphasize, to
forestall any potential awkwardness, that the examples here, unless
attributed to a source, are all fictional. While some may be lightly
inspired by my own experiences, no one else is implicated in the
anecdotes described here. A second source of awkwardness involves
the nature of the project, which attempts to bridge the philosophy
and psychology of awkwardness. Most of the existing empirical work
(with a few exceptions, which I note as I go) focuses on
embarrassment, so where I’ve co-opted it to apply to awkwardness,
I explain how and why.
The structure is as follows: the first two chapters lean toward the
descriptive and the empirical, offering a characterization of
awkwardness and situating it in relation to similar feelings and
experiences. The next four chapters make the normative case for
why and where awkwardness matters. After analyzing awkwardness
in terms of social scripts in chapter 1, chapter 2 explains what
distinguishes feeling awkward from other self-conscious emotions.
The remainder of the book assesses awkwardness’s normative
implications. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the relationship
between scripts and social norms, and how both of these guide us
through interactions and mark us as insiders or outsiders. In chapter
4, I start to look more closely at the implications of awkwardness for
moral discourse. I argue that some problems are morally awkward—
they resist categorization in terms of moral, social, or personal issue,
complicating our attempts to navigate our obligation. Chapter 5
looks at some ways this ambiguity is exploited—how awkwardness
can be “weaponized” to entrench existing forms of power and
injustice. But I also show how awkwardness can also be mobilized as
a form of resistance. So then, chapter 6 asks, where does this leave
us with respect to its normative status? I conclude that chapter—and
the book—by offering some suggestions about how to cope with
awkwardness: by rewriting our scripts to minimize it where we can,
and changing how we experience it and redistributing its costs
where we can’t.
This is only a start, and it’s incomplete. My goal here is not to
offer a comprehensive account of awkwardness in all its forms.
Rather, it’s to make the case for awkwardness as a distinct form of
social discomfort worthy of philosophical attention. The book is an
attempt at starting a conversation, not the last word. Hopefully, it
generates something more than an awkward silence.
Finally, a word of caution is in order: while the book begins by
discussing rather trivial, low-stakes cases of awkwardness, I don’t
mean to suggest that awkwardness itself is trivial. Far from it: as I’ll
argue throughout the later chapters, awkwardness can be leveraged
both to maintain instances of social injustice and exclusion, and to
resist them. Part of my hope in writing this book is that by
understanding how we get from failed small talk at cocktail parties
to failures to hold people accountable for sexual harassment, we will
better appreciate the significance of our everyday social interactions,
and the opportunities they—and their failures—present. For an
experience so often associated with silence, awkwardness has a lot
to say.

1 The main exceptions are Clegg 2012a, 2012b, and Kotsko 2010, two of the
few academic authors to tackle awkwardness directly and in depth. Kotsko’s book
is an essay on awkwardness, but focuses mainly on how it manifests in popular
culture. Dahl 2018 is an overview of the psychology of awkwardness and
embarrassment written for a general audience; Tashiro 2017 offers a blend of
psychology and self-help; Rhodes 2016 is a memoir/self-help book.
 1
This Is Awkward

1.1 Introduction: What Is Awkward?

This is awkward: you greet an acquaintance you haven’t seen for a
while. One of you goes in for a hug; the other initially offers a
handshake, and then leans in, by which time the hugger is
hesitating. In the end, you both do a half-hearted back pat, and
then settle into stilted small talk. Variation: suppose the friend is one
from whom you’ve been estranged—your last encounter ended in a
falling-out, but that was some time ago, and you haven’t spoken
since. Does this make things more awkward?
This is awkward, too: you’re a graduate student having dinner
with a distinguished visiting speaker who wants to hear more about
your research. Suddenly, as you’re talking, a piece of food flies out
of your mouth and lands on their pristine black sweater. Did they see
it? Do they know? They must know. But there’s no acknowledgment;
you try not to stare at it, and continue the interaction, saying
nothing.
And this is awkward: someone you consider a friend is engaging
in inappropriate flirting at work. They’ve been going to bars with
subordinates after work, and even hooked up with one or two. You
think this is sexual harassment, and you know you should talk to
them about it, but you can’t seem to figure out how to have the
conversation.
These examples involve social situations where we find ourselves
not knowing how to act. They range from the trivial to the serious,
from quick interactions quickly forgotten to longer-term problems
with long-term implications. But they’re all instances of
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