Daily Dose: Embarrassment
What's Up Docs?
BBC
4.4 • 659 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2026
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this Daily Dose, Chris and Xand return to their episode on embarrassment with cultural historian, Dr Tiffany Watt-Smith. Tiffany identified that, while embarrassment is painful on a personal level, it is in fact an important social emotion.
Daily Doses of expert wisdom from previous episodes will be dropping each weekday throughout January (except Tuesdays). You'll find them in the What’s Up Docs? feed on BBC Sounds, alongside all the main episodes of the podcast.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Chris, does embarrassment hold you back a lot in everyday life? |
| 0:09.0 | It does a little bit, but I wish it did more. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm often embarrassed about a thing I've done. |
| 0:14.0 | Oh, yeah, but that's better. |
| 0:15.0 | I think it's better. |
| 0:16.0 | I wish I'd anticipated the future embarrassment more. |
| 0:18.0 | I think if you're a twin, you have the double embarrassment of going, |
| 0:21.2 | well, even if I behave with a certain amount of dignity and restraint, my brother is out there |
| 0:25.6 | acting a fool. Am I embarrassed by you? Come on. Perpetually. |
| 0:34.5 | Hello, Chris and I are here again with our daily dose. |
| 0:38.0 | Any recent embarrassments in 2026, aren't? |
| 0:40.9 | I try and forget them as soon as I can. Otherwise, they stay with me. |
| 0:44.5 | Well, hopefully today's daily dose will allow us to share the embarrassment a bit more. |
| 0:49.0 | We've got cultural historian Dr Tiffany Watsmith talk to us about why embarrassment feels |
| 0:53.8 | almost physically painful. |
| 0:55.9 | It makes me sort of curl up into a ball, but it also has benefits too. It's beneficial. |
| 1:00.8 | Embarrassment is important. Embarrassment is so important because it's what helps us |
| 1:06.3 | regulate our societies. You know, the fear of embarrassment stops us from doing things that might be |
| 1:11.3 | social transgression or make us stand out from the crowd in a certain way that would then be |
| 1:16.6 | disruptive for our communities. And then embarrassment itself, because I think we can distinguish |
| 1:21.2 | the fear of embarrassment from the feeling of embarrassment. So the fear of embarrassment is |
... |
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