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The next time you walk into a glass door, trip over your own two feet, or pass gas during yoga class, laugh at yourself instead of turning beet-red in embarrassment. New research suggests finding the humor in the moment will make you more likeable—and people will see you as warmer, more competent, and more authentic than if you’re still cringing 5 minutes later.
“For harmless social mistakes, laughing at yourself often makes you look better than blushing or showing embarrassment,” says study co-author Övül Sezer, an assistant professor at the Cornell University SC Johnson School of Business. “Owning your mistake and laughing first can completely shift the room—you move from being judged to being relatable.”
The study—published Feb. 26 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology—was inspired in part by Sezer’s research interests: She studies impression management, or the small behaviors that shape how other people see us. Researchers have long known that embarrassment is a socially useful phenomenon, because it signals remorse and respect for norms. Yet there’s a personal twist to her academic interests, too: Sezer’s experience performing stand-up comedy has shown her that sometimes the better move is to lean into the moment and let out a chuckle.
That dual perspective sparked a question: If you make a mistake, is embarrassment always the best move? Or might laughter be more effective?
When—and why—laughter works
In the study, Sezer and her colleagues ran six experiments involving more than 3,000 participants who read about other people’s embarrassing mishaps, like dramatically knocking over a glass in a restaurant or enthusiastically waving at the wrong person. They were then told or shown photos that gave them a sense of how the person who made the faux pas reacted. In some cases, the individual appeared flustered and self-conscious; in others, they reacted with humor and laughed at themselves. Participants then rated that person on traits such as warmth, competence, morality, and authenticity. Overall, those who laughed at their own minor blunders were judged more positively than those who appeared visibly embarrassed.
“Laughing at yourself signals self-acceptance, and we love people who accept themselves,” Sezer says. The ability to respond with humor is akin to a shoulder shrug—you’re not going to dwell on what other people might think of you. “These are classic, benign norm violations, meaning they’re a little awkward but they’re not harmful,” she adds. Plus, laughing at yourself sends a reassuring message to whoever’s nearby: “You don’t even have to comfort me anymore—it’s the best of both worlds.”
The findings match what Ildiko Tabori, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, observes and experiences in real life. She works with comedians at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood and says stand-up offers a kind of real-time laboratory for social dynamics. Comedians who laugh at themselves defuse tension and signal confidence, which makes it easier for audiences to join in. “It allows the audience to laugh at them, too,” Tabori says. “It gives them permission to have a human response.”
Interestingly, study participants frequently saw overt embarrassment as out of proportion to the offense—as if the person felt worse than the situation called for. In the experiments, observers consistently judged everyday blunders to be relatively harmless, even when the person committing them appeared mortified. That mismatch mattered. When someone seemed fixated on a small slip, it suggested heightened insecurity or an overfocus on how they were being judged. “Embarrassment signals heightened self-consciousness,” Sezer says. “It’s almost like you’re overly focused on how you’re being evaluated.”
Laughing, by contrast, conveyed that the person understood the mistake was trivial and didn’t require dramatic self-reproach. In other words, it wasn’t positivity that won people over—it was a reaction that felt proportional to the moment.
An important caveat
A key part of knowing when to laugh at yourself is being tuned in to when doing so isn’t appropriate. Sezer’s study found that people are only judged positively if their mistake is harmless. If someone trips and knocks over a colleague who breaks their arm, for example, it’s inappropriate for the person who caused the injury to laugh at themselves. The same is true if you congratulate a woman on being pregnant—only to learn she’s not.
“If someone else is hurt, laughter doesn’t look confident anymore—it actually looks insensitive, because it signals disregard,” Sezer says. “The key thing is to match your reaction to the seriousness of the moment.”
When someone is harmed, she adds, observers shift from evaluating likability to evaluating morality. In those situations, people expect visible signs of remorse. In the study’s final experiment, participants judged someone who laughed after injuring a colleague as significantly less competent and less moral than someone who showed embarrassment instead. Humor, in that context, wasn’t seen as self-assured—rather, it signaled that the person didn’t fully appreciate the consequences of their actions.
At the heart of it, Sezer says, is emotional calibration: “It’s this emotional awareness of the situation that you signal to others.”
Training yourself to laugh instead of blush
If you’re the type to light up like a fire engine when you say something awkward or get someone’s name wrong, that reaction can feel automatic. Yet there are ways to interrupt it and pivot toward humor instead.
The next time you accidentally hit “reply all” on an email to your entire company, remind yourself of the spotlight effect: We tend to vastly overestimate how much other people notice—and remember—our mistakes. “It’s not going to change your life, and other people don’t care about it as much as you do,” says Caleb Warren, a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona who studies what makes things funny. “People are far more conscious of their own identity than other people’s.”
That’s exactly what Sezer reminds herself before stand-up comedy performances: Other people judge our mistakes much less harshly than we expect they will. She suggests getting in the habit of saying to yourself: “OK, I made this mistake, but was anyone harmed?” The answer is probably no.
“Those types of reframing exercises may help us train ourselves—because I’m also a clumsy person who’s prone to embarrassment,” Sezer says. “This research inspired me to remind myself that I don’t need to be overly apologetic or excessively embarrassed. The best way to shift the dynamic is to laugh at myself, and that helps other people, too, because then they can join you in that laugh.”
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Angela Haupt
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