Did you listen to the audio recording that went viral this week, in which a call-center worker for Comcast humiliates himself by trying to bully a departing customer into maintaining his cable subscription? What about the latest excruciating video, of a candidate for the US Congress realizing he's made an embarrassing blunder, mistaking a bus full of YMCA campers for migrant children involved in the crisis at the Mexican border? Did you watch that? Or how about this moment in February when a news anchor – oh, kill me now, I can barely bring myself to write the words – confuses Samuel L Jackson, a guest on the show, with Laurence Fishburne? Did you catch that one?
I didn't. I haven't watched or listened to any of these, even though Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, assures me "you'll want to slap yourself in the face" if you don't watch the one about immigration. My excuse is that I suffer from a serious psychological condition – or a real one, anyway, with scientific backing and everything – that robs me of what seems, for others, to be one of the chief joys of the modern internet. And I know I'm far from alone. We are the Easily Empathetically Embarrassed, and we experience something very close to bodily pain at the thought of watching a YouTube video called Marriage Proposal Rejected At BasketBall Game, even though 5.5m other people already have. We can barely tolerate footage like this, of Tim Howard, America's World Cup hero, dodging an awkward hug from a fan.
If you're not EEE, you almost certainly can't grasp the all-encompassing, gut-churning agonies that the condition can induce. To be blunt, this is probably because, compared to us, you lack empathy. According to one 2011 study, there's a significant correlation between what the researchers labeled "vicarious embarrassment" and a generally high capacity for involvement in the emotional lives of others. The same brain regions, the study found, are implicated in vicarious embarrassment – watching President Obama give an awkward hug of his own to departing press secretary Jay Carney, say – as they are when empathizing with the physical pain of others.
It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that this research took place in Germany. (It involved, among other things, asking about 600 German students to contemplate scenarios like seeing another person belch in public or wearing a t-shirt saying 'I Am Sexy'.) There's a German word for everything, and just as there's a German word for taking pleasure in others' pain, there's one for the opposite, too: fremdscham. This means, more or less, "external shame", and the verb describing those of us who feel it is fremdschämen. Interestingly, as Maiai Szalavitz explained in Time, the researchers in 2011 also concluded that we sufferers aren't necessarily more embarrassable when it comes to ourselves: the extra sensitivity to vicarious humiliation really does seem to be attributable to empathy.
Look, the simple way of putting all this is that science proves I'm a better person than you for not enjoying videos of kids embarrassing themselves at spelling bees. Sorry.
This isn't much comfort, though, given EEE's all-pervasiveness. Empathetic embarrassment can strike whether or not the other person is aware of the faux pas he's committing. It can even strike merely as a result of the expectation that the other person might commit a faux pas in the near future. I've inadvertently insulted people at weddings and other events by instinctively covering my face as a speech begins, just because there's a possibility the jokes will fall flat.
Nor does it seem to matter if the person being embarrassed is a deeply unpleasant bigot who frankly deserves it, as when anti-Semites and homophobes are shown up by the antics of Sacha Baron Cohen. (You'll not be shocked to hear that I've never managed to watch his movies.) My only respite is fiction: I truly don't understand those people who claim to feel excruciating psychological pain while watching, say, The Office. Mercifully, it looks as though Baron Cohen's forthcoming film is fully fictional, too.
I'm not asking for special treatment. It's just that ... well, OK, I suppose I am asking for special treatment. Three things, specifically, that would make life so much easier for the ultra-empathetic souls who live among you. First, every cringe-video should be accompanied by a transcript: these things are much more bearable that way. Second, dial back the hyperbole: if a video's only slightly embarrassing – like that Tim Howard one, when I forced myself – don't describe it as "incredibly awkward". (Maybe we need a cringe-rating star system, from "mildly discomfiting" to "danger of falling immediately to the floor in the fetal position".) That way, I might actually click and watch.
Third, and perhaps most important: unless you are a hip-hop musician, never, ever, ever present anything – corporate videos, church sermons, sex education films – in the form of a rap. This rap-based training video for Wendy's, for example, is wholly unacceptable. So are these awkward Christians. Although I'm told that one's a fake. I'll never know for sure – I couldn't bring myself to watch it.
