The Burden of Being in the Way

The Burden of Being in the Way

Why Some of Us Feel Responsible for Everyone Else’s Comfort, Expectations, and Imaginary Disappointments

Brian D. Baxter

Have you ever felt rushed in the grocery store checkout because someone got in line behind you? You’re fumbling with your wallet, trying to get your groceries into the cart, and suddenly you feel like you’re holding up everyone’s lives. Nobody has said a word. Nobody is tapping their foot. For all you know, the person behind you is perfectly content scrolling through pictures of their grandkids. Nevertheless, you’re apologizing to the cashier and the folks behind you and start moving like you’ve just been informed that the building is on fire.

Or maybe you’re at the gym, finishing your last set on a machine. Someone approaches and asks how many sets you have left. You tell them one, which is perfectly reasonable, but now your workout has become a race against an imaginary clock. You shorten your rest period, rush through your reps, and practically leap off the machine when you’re finished; after thoroughly wiping it down with the Clorox wipe you had staged and ready.

What about that moment when the seat belt light goes out and you immediately start planning the most efficient operational plan for retrieving your bag from the overhead compartment so that the people in the seats behind you experience no inconvenience at your expense? But why? You paid for your groceries, your gym membership and your plane ticket the same as everyone else. You were there first. You haven’t done anything wrong. And yet you feel anxious and perhaps even guilty.

For some of us, these experiences are so familiar that we barely recognize them anymore. We move through life with a persistent awareness of how our behavior might affect other people (which is good), often accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling that we’re somehow responsible for preventing their disappointment, frustration, or inconvenience (which is not good). It can make us thoughtful, considerate, and dependable. It can also be exhausting. Sometimes, things get even stranger.

Feeling Uncomfortable for Somebody Else

Imagine you’re listening to a friend tell a story. They pause, searching for a word. Before they’ve had a chance to collect their thoughts, you’ve supplied three possibilities and practically finished the story for them.

Or you’re sitting in a meeting while a coworker struggles to explain an idea. You sense that the room is growing impatient, although nobody has actually indicated that they’re impatient, so you jump in to explain what your coworker is trying to say.

Maybe you’ve watched someone struggle with a self-checkout machine and felt an almost irresistible urge to intervene. The person might be perfectly happy figuring it out themselves, but you’re already imagining, and taking responsibility for the frustration of everyone waiting behind them. Here’s the peculiar part. You’re experiencing discomfort over an imagined impact of someone else’s behavior and feeling responsible for fixing it. The person telling the story may not be embarrassed. Your coworker may not need rescuing. The customer at the self-checkout may not be worried about the line. But you are.

Somehow, you’ve taken an imaginary social consequence of someone else’s behavior and made it your own problem. And now you feel an urgent need to solve it.

The Audience in Our Heads

Psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky described something called the spotlight effect in a 2000 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their research demonstrated that people tend to overestimate how much attention others pay to their appearance and behavior. We tend to think we’re being noticed far more than we actually are.

That helps explain why a person might feel embarrassed about holding up a grocery store line even when nobody appears particularly concerned. But there’s another psychological process worth considering.

Psychologists have long studied fear of negative evaluation, which involves concern about being judged unfavorably by others. For some people, the possibility of disapproval carries considerable emotional weight. They may become sensitive to signs of displeasure, impatience, disappointment, or frustration, even when those signs are ambiguous or absent.

The person behind you in line might simply be looking at the clock. You interpret that glance as impatience. Your mind fills in the gaps and creates the story that you begin to tell yourself. Suddenly you’re apologizing for an inconvenience that nobody has complained about. The emotional reaction is real, even when the judgment is imaginary.

Embarrassment by Proxy

Now consider what happens when we experience these feelings on behalf of someone else. Researchers have studied a phenomenon called vicarious embarrassment, which occurs when we feel embarrassed while observing another person’s behavior. In a 2011 study, psychologist Sören Krach and colleagues explored how people experience embarrassment on behalf of others, including situations where the person being observed doesn’t appear embarrassed themselves.

Think about that for a moment. You can experience embarrassment for someone who isn’t even embarrassed themselves. Anyone who has watched an awkward speech, an over enthusiastic karaoke singer, an uncomfortable television interview, or a painfully unsuccessful attempt at humor probably recognizes the feeling, but some of us take the experience a little further. We feel compelled to intervene.

We finish sentences, explain intentions, make excuses, offer unsolicited assistance, or attempt to redirect conversations. We anticipate the social consequences of another person’s behavior and feel an urgency to prevent them. Sometimes we’re genuinely helpful. Other times we’re interrupting someone who was doing perfectly fine without us. And occasionally, our efforts to prevent an awkward situation create exactly what we intended to avoid. There’s something almost comically ironic about becoming so concerned with preventing another person’s embarrassment that we embarrass them ourselves.

Helping Others, or Relieving Appropriated Anxiety?

Picture yourself on an airplane. A mother is traveling with a crying baby. She’s doing everything she can to comfort the child, but nothing seems to work. You offer to help. It’s a kind gesture, and perhaps your assistance makes the flight a little easier for everyone. But what prompted you to intervene?

Were you sincerely concerned about the mother and baby? Or were you more worried that other passengers might become irritated because of them? Were you personally bothered by the crying? Or did you imagine the other passengers becoming irritated, feel uncomfortable about the possibility, and decide that helping would relieve your own appropriated anxiety? It’s worth noting that these motivations can overlap, and none automatically makes the resulting behavior good or bad.

Psychologist C. Daniel Batson and his colleagues explored an important distinction between empathic concern and personal distress. Empathic concern involves feelings of sympathy and compassion for someone else. Personal distress involves our own discomfort in response to another person’s circumstances. Both can motivate helping behavior but they are not the same.

Sometimes we help because another person is suffering. Sometimes we help because witnessing or anticipating their suffering makes us uncomfortable. And sometimes we may be trying to prevent a reaction that hasn’t happened and may never happen. The assistance might be equally valuable in each situation, but the feelings that prompted it can come from completely different places.

That brings us to an uncomfortable question. How often are we helping someone because they need help, and how often are we helping because we need them not to need help?

Taking Responsibility for Things That Aren’t Ours

There’s another psychological concept that may help explain these experiences. Researchers studying obsessive-compulsive thinking have examined inflated responsibility, a tendency to believe that one has more responsibility for preventing negative outcomes than circumstances reasonably justify. This concept is associated with particular clinical conditions, but it offers an interesting way to think about everyday experiences without suggesting that everyone who recognizes these behaviors has a disorder.

Consider the person who apologizes when someone else makes a mistake, explains a friend’s behavior before anyone has questioned it, or feels personally responsible for keeping an entire meeting comfortable and productive despite having no authority over the meeting. Some people seem to carry responsibility for outcomes they neither caused nor control, and here’s where the experience can become particularly confusing: they may understand intellectually that the situation isn’t their responsibility, they just don’t feel that way.

Knowing that someone else’s impatience isn’t your problem doesn’t necessarily make the discomfort disappear. Knowing that your coworker can finish their own explanation doesn’t always stop the urge to rescue them. The emotional response can arrive well before you’ve had time to consider whether intervention is necessary.

Performing for the Boss, Even When They Aren’t Watching

There’s another version of this experience. One that may be especially familiar to people who grew up around demanding parents, worked in highly structured organizations, or spent time in the military. It involves the real or imagined presence and perceived expectations of someone in authority.

Imagine you’re working alongside a colleague when a supervisor walks into the room. Your colleague is explaining something, and you suddenly become concerned that their explanation isn’t what the supervisor wants to hear. Maybe they’re taking too long, using the wrong terminology, or failing to emphasize something you believe is important. Before you know it, you’ve interrupted to clarify their point, redirect their explanation, or provide the answer you think the supervisor is expecting.

Your colleague may have been doing perfectly fine. The supervisor may have been listening with genuine interest. Nobody asked you to intervene. Nevertheless, you felt an obligation to protect the yourself from a negative evaluation that existed primarily in your imagination and probably wouldn’t have landed on you in the first place.

Here’s a real kicker, sometimes the authority figure doesn’t even have to be present, or even exist. You might find yourself correcting another person’s work because you anticipate what the boss would think if they saw it as-is. You might explain a coworker’s decision before anyone questions it, or rush to complete a task because you imagine how an unfinished assignment might appear to someone reviewing your performance. Sometimes there isn’t even an identifiable authority figure. There’s simply a lingering sense that someone, somewhere, would disapprove of how things are being done and you feel like you’ll be the one to blame.

Psychologists have studied related processes involving internalized expectations, self-monitoring, and concerns about evaluation. E. Tory Higgins’s self-discrepancy theory (1987), for example, examines the emotional consequences of perceived differences between who we believe we are and who we believe we ought to be. Those expectations can reflect the standards of important people in our lives. Similarly, Deci and Ryan (2000) described how expectations and values originating outside ourselves can gradually become part of our own motivation and self-regulation.

Over time, we may begin enforcing standards that were once imposed by parents, teachers, supervisors, or other authority figures, even when nobody is actively evaluating our behavior, and in the situations we’ve been discussing, we may go a step further by attempting to enforce those imagined standards on someone else. Sound familiar big brothers and big sisters?

For someone who learned early in life that avoiding criticism required anticipating what an authority figure wanted, this tendency may become particularly strong. A child who regularly tried to prevent a parent’s displeasure may grow into an adult who instinctively anticipates a supervisor’s dissatisfaction. A person accustomed to military inspections, evaluations, or strict accountability may become especially attentive to how work and behavior might appear to someone in command. Even when the performance being inspected or evaluated is being done by someone else.

These are possible learning pathways rather than inevitable outcomes. Many people respond to demanding environments without developing these tendencies, and others develop them without any obvious history of strict authority, but the psychological experience is worth examining because it introduces yet another layer of imagined responsibility. Remember, we’re not only anticipating what someone else might think about our behavior. We’re anticipating what an authority figure might think about another person’s behavior, assuming that judgment will somehow reflect upon us, and intervening to prevent it.

We may even begin correcting other people according to standards they were never asked to meet, and perhaps the most revealing part is how uncomfortable we can become when someone simply continues doing things their own way. We may recognize that they have every right to proceed, yet still feel an urgent need to step in because we can practically feel the disappointment and hear the criticism we imagine is coming.

Sometimes the boss doesn’t have to be watching because we’ve become so remarkably good at watching on their often imaginary behalf.

Why We Feel Better After Intervening

Suppose you’re listening to someone struggle through an explanation. You become increasingly uncomfortable, imagining that everyone else is growing impatient. Finally, you interrupt and finish the explanation and, lo and behold, the discomfort subsides. The audience experience may have been interrupted. Your intervention may have accomplished absolutely nothing useful. Your coworker may be irritated. But you feel better.

Psychologists call one process that can maintain this pattern negative reinforcement. Many people associate negative reinforcement with punishment, but that’s a misapplication. Negative reinforcement occurs when a behavior removes an unpleasant feeling. It’s the opposite of positive reinforcement which occurs when a behavior adds a positive feeling. When a behavior removes a negative feeling we’re more likely to repeat it under similar circumstances. The relief becomes its own reward.

Over time, we may become increasingly practiced at intervening whenever we experience, or even anticipate discomfort. The trouble is that we rarely discover what would have happened if we’d simply waited. Maybe the speaker would have found the right words. Maybe the person at the checkout would have figured out the machine. Maybe nobody would have become impatient. By intervening, we’ve relieved our discomfort while missing an opportunity to learn that the feared outcome might never have occurred.

Where Does This Come From?

For some people, these patterns may have roots in childhood. Imagine growing up in a household where a parent’s mood could change quickly, where mistakes were met with harsh criticism, or where keeping the peace depended on anticipating what someone else needed – or needed to do. A child in that environment might become particularly attentive to facial expressions, tone of voice, silence, and other signs of possible displeasure. Learning to anticipate an authority figure’s reactions could make life more predictable. Research on parental conditional regard, including work by Assor, Roth, and Deci, has examined the emotional consequences of children experiencing parental approval as dependent upon meeting expectations.

A child who learns that acceptance depends on being helpful, mistake-free, and preventing disappointment may carry some of those expectations into adulthood. Eventually, anticipating other people’s needs can become so familiar that it feels like a responsibility rather than a choice. Of course, childhood experiences are only part of the picture. Personality, temperament, peer relationships, culture, and later experiences can all influence how we interpret social situations, and these tendencies can develop or become reinforced long after childhood.

Consider highly disciplined industries such as public safety and military service. Military and para-military organizations place considerable emphasis on accountability, anticipation, preparation, and completing assigned responsibilities of both the individual and the group. Learning to recognize potential problems before they develop can be essential to accomplishing a mission and protecting teammates. These are invaluable skills in high stakes, high risk environments.

But imagine someone who already feels unusually responsible for other people’s expectations entering an environment where anticipating problems and preventing mistakes are consistently rewarded. It’s reasonable to wonder whether those experiences might strengthen existing habits of vigilance and responsibility. Someone who has spent years learning to anticipate the expectations of others may find it difficult to stop doing so when the circumstances no longer require it.

That possibility deserves further research. Military service doesn’t necessarily produce these tendencies, and many people develop them without ever serving. Still, the connection between learned expectations and later behavior is worth considering.

When Being Considerate Becomes Exhausting

Note, none of these behaviors is necessarily harmful. Being attentive to others can make us wonderful friends, partners, coworkers, and neighbors. Anticipating problems can prevent mistakes. Helping someone who is struggling can make their day easier. Taking responsibility for our commitments is generally a good thing.

The difficulty arises when these behaviors stop feeling voluntary.

When we cannot enjoy our workout because someone is waiting for the machine. When we cannot tolerate a pause in conversation. When we feel compelled to apologize for situations we didn’t create. When another person’s possible embarrassment becomes our own emergency. Or when an unfinished obligation follows us around mentally, demanding attention long after we’ve reasonably decided it can wait.

For some people, ordinary social interactions become a constant exercise in predicting and managing other people’s reactions. And the predictions are often based on very little information. We imagine impatience, embarrassment, disappointment, or criticism. We assign ourselves responsibility for preventing those reactions. Then we act to relieve the discomfort we’ve created through anticipation. The process can happen so quickly that we barely recognize it. We simply feel the urge to do something.

Learning to Leave a Little Discomfort Alone

Perhaps the most interesting question is what happens when we resist that urge. What happens if we finish our workout at a reasonable pace? What happens if we allow someone to search for a word without supplying it? What happens if we let a coworker finish explaining an idea, even when we believe we could explain it better? What happens if we recognize that someone else might be mildly inconvenienced and accept that the world will continue turning?

For people who experience these feelings intensely, the answers may be surprisingly uncomfortable. But discomfort isn’t always evidence that something is wrong. Sometimes it’s simply the emotional consequence of allowing a situation to unfold without trying to control it, and perhaps that’s where a little more self-awareness becomes useful.

Before intervening, we might ask ourselves whether someone actually needs assistance, whether anyone has actually expressed dissatisfaction, and whether we’re actually responding to something that has actually happened or is it something we’ve imagined might happen. We might also consider whether our desire to help is accompanied by a desire to escape our own discomfort.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with either feeling. Recognizing the difference simply gives us more freedom to choose what we do next. After all, our coworker might appreciate the opportunity to finish a thought. The mother with the crying baby might welcome our assistance, or she might prefer that we leave her alone. The person behind us at the grocery store might be perfectly happy waiting, but if they’re not, that probably has very little to do with us.

Sometimes, the most considerate thing we can do is allow other people to experience ordinary life without assuming responsibility for them. We may discover that the world is considerably more forgiving than the audience we’ve been carrying around in our heads. Wouldn’t that be a relief?

And What About the People Who Don’t Seem to Notice?

Of course, there’s another side to this story. For every person who worries about taking up too much space, there seems to be someone who has never given the matter a second thought.

You know them. The ones who stop their shopping carts in the middle of a busy aisle to examine a can of soup. The ones who stand in doorways having conversations while everyone else navigates around them. Or my personal favorite, the airline passengers who leap to their feet the instant the seatbelt sign goes off, grab their bags from the overhead compartment, and block the aisle while the people seated in front of them wait patiently for their turn to leave.

How can some of us be so painfully cognizant of our impact on others while some people appear completely oblivious to theirs? That’s a conversation worth having, too.

Coming Next: The Other Side of the Aisle: Why Some People Seem Oblivious to People Around Them

References

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Batson, C. D., Fultz, J., & Schoenrade, P. A. (1987). Distress and empathy: Two qualitatively distinct vicarious emotions with different motivational consequences. Journal of Personality, 55(1), 19–39.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222.

Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94(3), 319–340.

Krach, S., et al. (2011). Your flaws are my pain: Linking empathy to vicarious embarrassment. PLOS ONE, 6(4), e18675.

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Watson, D., & Friend, R. (1969). Measurement of social-evaluative anxiety. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 33(4), 448–457.