Life can be so awkward. Here's how to embrace the embarrassing

TED Radio Hour

This episode of TED Radio Hour explores the multifaceted nature of social awkwardness and embarrassment. Through the lenses of psychology, a

Key takeaways

• Psychologist Ty Tashiro identifies three core traits of awkward individuals: social skill deficits, communication struggles, and obsessive interests.
• Ty Tashiro suggests a correlation between awkwardness and extraordinary achievement due to the power of hyper-focus.

Main topics

• Social Awkwardness
• Neurodiversity

Notable quotes

The key is figuring out how to fit in without losing yourself.

Conclusion

Embracing our most awkward and vulnerable moments can serve as a catal

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy, David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right. Because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:23) This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You Speaker 7 (0:44) just don't know what you're going to find. Speaker 2 (0:45) Challenge you. We Speaker 7 (0:46) truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And Speaker 2 (0:49) even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. Speaker 2 (1:01) I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and I hate to do this to you, but we are going to start the show back in the painfully awkward days of middle school. Speaker 1 (1:13) If you think about a cafeteria, there was the cool kid table, there's the athlete table, and maybe the edgy alternative table. But there was always a table of nerds. Speaker 2 (1:25) This is Tai Tashiro. Speaker 1 (1:28) The socially... Awkward kids who were the furthest thing from cool, who were maybe a little physically clumsy, who dressed frumpy. Speaker 2 (1:36) And yeah, that was Ty. Speaker 1 (1:39) I sat at that table. Speaker 2 (1:42) So it was the first week of school. He had just started seventh grade. Speaker 1 (1:46) And at my table were three other guys. One was Hassan. He was kind of this math prodigy who ended up taking classes at the high school. Speaker 2 (1:56) There was Will. He spent his time building model pine cars. He Speaker 1 (2:00) apparently dominated the pine car racing circuit. Speaker 2 (2:03) And Eddie. He was the funny one. Speaker 1 (2:05) But he had this dry humor, kind of a Wes Anderson humor that nobody really got. Speaker 1 (2:12) And we were all, you know, nice kids. We were good kids. But we were definitely not cool. Speaker 2 (2:19) And as the four looked around, they knew that they weren't cool, but they didn't understand why gossipy people wearing torn jeans or aviator sunglasses were. Speaker 1 (2:31) And no one played tag or King of the Mountain or Foursquare or any of these other things we thought were really cool. Instead, kids just stood around. Speaker 2 (2:41) Ty, Hassan, Will, and Eddie thought this was boring and absurd. And so they were going to do something about it. They were going to play. Speaker 1 (2:50) We were going to bring back the good old days of recess and inspire other kids to rediscover the wonders of play. Speaker 1 (3:00) So, after some deliberation, we decided to kick it off with one of our favorite playtime activities, which were reenactments of wrestling matches from the Worldwide Wrestling Federation. Speaker 2 (3:14) They staked out a corner of the schoolyard between a chain-link fence and a soccer goal and got down to the important decision of deciding who would play who. Speaker 1 (3:24) Will declared that he'd play Hulk Hogan, who is the current champion. Someone else was Randy Macho Man Savage. Hasan selected the Iron Sheik. And keeping with these kind of semi-offensive racial stereotypes, I chose to be Mr. Fuji, who was the lone Japanese-American wrestler in the Federation. Speaker 1 (3:44) And we really got into it. Speaker 2 (3:46) There were chokeholds, eye rakes, Speaker 1 (3:48) arm bars, body slams. And Speaker 2 (3:51) all the elaborate theater that went along with it. And it was fun. Speaker 1 (3:56) Fly into the fence and then bounce back in double time. And then you'd clothesline them in the neck with your outstretched arm. Speaker 2 (4:04) This went on for weeks, Ty and his friends swinging each other around, until one day... Speaker 1 (4:11) I paused to wipe the sweat from my brow, and I just happened to glance at the other students in the courtyard. And all of a sudden, for the first time, I had this sharp revelation. None of the other kids were joining us. A few of them watched us with a mixture of fascination and horror. And as I realized all this, I felt my stomach sink, and I felt a panic in my chest. Now, right at that moment of realization, Hulk Hogan placed his tight grip onto my arm, and he began to swing me around to build momentum, kind of like an Olympian getting ready to do the hammer throw. And my social life was kind of flashing before my eyes. you know, will release me and it sent me forehead first into one of the steel fence posts. When I regained consciousness, I opened my eyes, and my vision was blurred, and all I could see that there was this large group of kids that had gathered around the spectacle of me being knocked unconscious. Speaker 2 (5:28) Dazed and embarrassed, Ty stared up at seemingly every kid who he had ever wanted to impress, and he wondered, why am I like this? Speaker 1 (5:40) Why am I so socially awkward? And what am I going to do about that? Speaker 2 (5:47) Life is full of awkward occasions and people. And not just in middle school. It's going for a hug when the other person offers a handshake. It's that awful photo of you at the age of 12 that your mom puts on Facebook every year. It's every single appointment with the gynecologist. So how can we get over ourselves and make peace even appreciate? the most cringeworthy interactions in our lives. On the show today, people who have found ways to shrug off shame and embrace the awkward through conversations, research, even art. But back to Tai Tashiro. In middle school, wrestling was just the latest in a long string of socially awkward behavior. Young Ty had a hard time reading body language. He was clumsy, prone to daydreaming, and he knew it. So he started studying how to overcome some of his awkwardness. Speaker 6 (6:51) I found kind of social role models, social heroes who were my peers. And you try to do it in a way that's not creepy, of course, but you're just kind of observing, hey, how do they navigate greetings? You know, what do they say? Speaker 2 (7:05) Give me an example. What would you write? Speaker 6 (7:07) The bus stop was a big challenge for me. Speaker 2 (7:10) There Speaker 6 (7:10) were these three cute girls at the bus stop. And of course, I never had any idea about what to say. I did want to say something. There was a new kid at school. It's kind of good looking, mini Tom Cruise like kind of guy. And I watched this smooth talker at the bus stop. And boy, was I taking notes about that. And one of the things I took away from that, which might not sound obvious to folks, was just the casualness with which he approached the situation. You know, my tendency, still sometimes to this day, is to come in hot. But, you know, he would just come in so easy and so casual, and I just kind of wrote that down. Speaker 2 (7:59) No big surprise that later, Ty ended up studying psychology and even wrote a book about the science of awkwardness and what makes some people feel so ill at ease in the world. Speaker 6 (8:12) Yeah, I think it's helpful to understand two different aspects of awkwardness. So there's awkward moments and then there's awkward people. Awkward people, they actually think about the world and take in the world differently than people who aren't. awkward. And it really falls into three characteristics. So awkward people have social skill deficits. They have a hard time knowing what's expected in a social situation and also have a hard time executing the right social skill. They have trouble communicating. which can be understanding what someone's trying to tell them, but also communicating what they intend to other people. And the third thing is obsessive interests. And I actually kind of love this. People who are awkward really love what they love, but sometimes to their detriment. So they can become hyper-focused on something and lose track of the broader social narrative. Speaker 2 (9:09) It's interesting because I think a lot of times people Speaker 2 (9:14) conflate the awkward person with a person who is on the autism spectrum. Speaker 6 (9:20) But Speaker 2 (9:21) are they very different? Where is there a crossover? Speaker 6 (9:24) Yeah. So psychology and psychiatry have kind of taught us to think about mental diagnoses as categorical, as either or kinds of things, right? You either have depression or you don't. And that's actually kind of unhelpful. Because the average person might have a couple of mild depressive symptoms, like one or two. The average person actually has maybe just a couple of awkward or autistic traits in a mild kind of way. And so it runs along this continuum. And so awkward people aren't autistic. I don't think it would be good for us to say that they're on the autism spectrum. But it is the case that it's not a clean cutoff. So autistic people are kind of like in the top 1 % of autistic symptoms. But then there's all these people that fall at the 98th percentile or 95th percentile, 90th percentile. And they still have a lot of problems with social skills and communication. And so they're closer to someone who's autistic than they are to someone who's average. And so what do we call that? And as I got into it, I thought, well, we call someone with social skill. deficits and communication problems. We call those people awkward. I can't tell you how many people I've run into over the past couple years who have said, you know what, my son or daughter would be at like that 95th percentile of autism characteristics, and they can never qualify for a diagnosis, but they can't get their kid any help just because they don't cross that threshold. So, yeah, how do we still have empathy for that? And how do we as a society support people who are really struggling but just don't meet that threshold? Speaker 2 (11:14) Earlier, you mentioned various common traits of awkward people. And I want to ask you about one of them, which is having sort of narrow interests. Speaker 6 (11:26) Yes, as a common characteristic. It's actually one of my favorites. Awkward people, on average, I mean, they really love what they love. I mean, a lot. And I think that's a wonderful quality, all that passion that they have for their interests. I met an awkward adult a couple of years ago who told me they liked Game of Thrones, which a lot of people did like Game of Thrones. But this person really, really loved Game of Thrones. They had learned to speak Dothraki, which was one of the languages spoken in that show. And so that kind of shows you the level of focus and the level of obsessiveness that kind of differentiates an awkward person from... you know, kind of the average person who has their likes and their interests. There's a quick analogy that's helpful to think about a lot of this science. Imagine that there's a stage, and let's say it's broadly illuminated. Speaker 2 (12:20) Tai Tashiro continues from the TED stage. Speaker 6 (12:23) You could see everything that happens. You could see people enter stage left or exit stage right. You could gather the social context surrounding the action, but you would spend most of your time looking center stage, because that's where most of the... key interactions will take place. And that's how most people see the social world unfold. Now, awkward people, by comparison, see that same stage not broadly illuminated, but spotlighted. And to make things interesting, that spotlight tends to fall a little left of center. So that means they're going to miss a lot of the key social information that's taking place, but they're going to have this brilliant perspective on an unusual part of the interactions and of the plot. Speaker 2 (13:10) In a minute, more