To feel embarrassed is to feel socially exposed in an unwanted way.
People are typically embarrassed when they have been observed making a mistake. Whether the error is technical or moral, the embarrassed person feels that it has revealed a flaw that they would rather keep concealed. Embarrassment can also occur, however, when people are praised in a manner that they don’t believe they deserve.
The pain of embarrassment come from the gap between what the embarrassed person would like to believe about who they are, and what they have been seen to be. The key is that the discrepancy is seen by other people. Embarrassment is inherently social. People can feel silly, clumsy, or idiotic when they make a mistake when they’re alone, but it’s not possible to feel embarrassed without being observed. Observation by others makes the discrepancy in the embarrassed person’s identity impossible to deny.
Sometimes, people feel embarrassed merely by having attention drawn to them, even if that attention lacks a strongly positive or negative tone. Such contexts suggest that the core of embarrassment is the experience of being seen and feeling unprepared to deal with the observation. Embarrassment is thus indicative of a crisis of identity, the opposite of confidence.
