Cringe

ABSTRACT

While shame and embarrassment have received significant attention in philosophy and psychology, cringe (also sometimes called ‘vicarious embarrassment’ and ‘vicarious shame’) has received little thought. This is surprising as the relatively new genre of cringe comedy has seen a meteoric rise since the early 2000s. In this paper, I aim to offer a novel characterization of cringe as a hostile social emotion which turns out to be closer to disgust and horror than to shame or embarrassment, thus disclosing ‘vicarious shame’ and ‘vicarious embarrassment’ to be misnomers. The closing part offers an explanation as to why cringe and cringe comedy in particular have become recently more relevant: cringe allows one to express hostility and disgust (often at other forms of life) in a nonviolent manner which fits perfectly well within the permissible boundaries of tolerance set up in liberal Western democracies since the second half of the 20^th century.

KEYWORDS:

• Cringe
• vicarious embarrassment
• vicarious shame
• emotions

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While shame and embarrassment are sometimes treated as different phenomena, the current focus on cringe (Fremdscham) allows us to gloss over these differences.

2. For the changing semantics of ‘cringe’ in the age of social media, cf. Gomez-Mejia (2020, 317ff.).

3. Hacker (2017) further speaks of ‘other-directed shame’ which seemingly picks out a different kind of shame, i.e. not what is described here as cringe, but a kind where one feels due to the actions of others, not instead of others.

4. Paulus et al. (2013) – likely due to their background in psychology – use the term ‘empathetic’ (rather than ‘sympathetic’) here, but this terminology is contentious insofar as empathy is often regarded in philosophy as a capacity of discernment of emotions in others (e.g. Edith Stein’s original sense of Einfühlung). Empathy then does not necessarily sharing an emotion with someone (psychologists Nadler, Dvash, and Shamay-Tsoory 2015 commit the same terminological mix-up). Hence, what these authors have in mind is better described as ‘sympathetic’.

5. In this way cringe (vicarious embarrassment) is different from vicarious anger. In vicarious anger, I am really just angry on behalf of someone else.

6. Cf. also Montes Sánchez and Salice (2017) who offer an exhaustive argument as to why Fremdscham is to be delineated from shame simpliciter.

7. In an excellent paper, Mayer et al. (2021) are the only ones to consider the role of laughter in cringing. They suggest that laughter likely only occurs in cringing at someone if the cringer is not strongly committed to the social norms being broken. While this may sometimes be the case, I would contend that the point of cringing and cringe comedy often is that one is supposed to laugh at something even if someone finds the norm violation in question offensive; and whether or not the cringer can get over their initial knee-jerk reaction is a sign of character and sense of humour.

8. Some may hold that social hostility is not a sufficient criterion to demarcate cringe from shame or embarrassment. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this point to my attention.

9. The only other publication putting cringing closer to horror is Hye-Knudsen (2018, 14ff.).

10. I am indebted to Lambert Wiesing for pointing me into this direction. The following remarks are not meant to imply that cringing did not exist or was never relevant before the 20^th century. I am merely suggesting that cringing as an emotion is growing in relevance because of these relatively newly developing social structures that are increasingly disallowing physical violence in virtually any social situation. In addition, it may be controversial to some to suggest that forms of life have proliferated since, say, the second half of the 20^th century. This is due to factors like urbanization, the global triumph of Hollywood, or the death of different languages or even Fukuyama’s so-called ‘End of History’. These are processes that suggest global homogenization rather than stratification. It is indeed difficult to conclusively, empirically settle whether, globally speaking, forms of life have been proliferating or declining given such developments, particularly taking into consideration the parallel population explosion over the last hundred years. Hence, the suggestion here about the stratification of forms of life here is restricted to liberal Western democracies since the second half of the 20^th century. In this restricted context, we can consider enormous social changes begetting and stemming from the stratification of forms of life. Normalization of non-heterosexuality, loosening the grip of sexual morality in general, the acceptance of neurodiversity, the de-medicalization and de-pathologization of many conditions, the prevalence of hormonal birth control, the rise of feminism, the softening of gender norms, democratization of higher education or intensifying migration from the global south have all catalyzed the development of ‘alternative’ forms of life. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this general problematic to my attention.

11. The psychologists Mayer et al. (2021, 5) seem to share a similar idea when they state that cringe comedy presupposes that the audience and (some of the) protagonists share the same ‘normative framework’.

12. There can, however, be questionable forms of cringe. While not properly part of cringe comedy, the simultaneous rise of reality TV formats that deserve the moniker ‘Trash TV’ also utilize cringe as a form of entertainment to keep engagement high. Examples of such Trash TV are Jersey Shore, Temptation Island or Wife Swap. Shows of this ilk aim to evoke a highly concentrated feeling of cringe in the audience that is overly hostile in a manner that rarely obtains in real life. This form of cringe is often pernicious, especially in cases where the cringees are socially disenfranchised, struggling members of society. In such cases, the effect of social distinction of cringe is ‘weaponized’ to further entrench and evoke classism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas J. Spiegel

Thomas J. Spiegel is Humboldt & JSPS postdoctoral fellow at Waseda University. Prior to that he was wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the University of Potsdam. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Leipzig in 2017.