Years of exposure to Americans has, at last, convinced me they’re correct in their stance on one of life’s great dilemmas: when eating at a restaurant, it really is fine to politely send your food back if it’s not what you ordered, cold when it should be hot, covered in cheese when you asked for no cheese, etc. Of course, the prospect makes my stomach clench with anxiety; the British fear of making a scene is embedded in my soul. But what persuaded me, in the end, was realising how self-centred that fear usually is. Are you really such a big deal that your no-cheese request will paralyse your fellow diners with awkwardness, ruin the waiter’s day, and send waves of post-traumatic shock through the kitchen? Face it: you’re not. Instead, you’re in the grip of what might be termed “egocentric reticence”. Paradoxically, your fear of making everything about you rests on the assumption that everything already is.
Egocentric reticence reared its head again the other day (or should I say it refused to rear its head, for fear of making a spectacle of itself?) in a study about gratitude, which found that people systematically underestimate how much delight a thank-you note can bring. The psychologists Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley had people send grateful messages to someone who’d made a difference in their lives. Again and again, they found, senders assumed their words would trigger less happiness and more awkwardness than they really did – and that recipients would judge their letter-writing competence harshly, too. Even in the seemingly selfless context of expressing gratitude, senders couldn’t help giving too much weight to their own perspective. So if you refrain from sending someone a thank-you note because you’re worried you’ll make them feel awkward, or annoyed by your prose, you’re letting egocentrism sabotage an action that would have made both of you happier.
The most acute form of egocentric reticence, surely, is extreme shyness. Understandably, sufferers don’t always like hearing it described that way – yet if you’re incapacitated by the sense that others are scrutinising and judging you, aren’t you vastly exaggerating how much of their brain space you’re occupying? In a famous experiment, students wearing Barry Manilow T-shirts, selected for maximum embarrassment, walked through rooms full of their classmates; roughly half as many people noticed the T-shirt than the wearers assumed.
“Shyness is just egotism out of its depth,” Penelope Keith once told an interviewer – a line the writer Sadie Stein credits with curing her own shyness. “For some reason, the unequivocal harshness of that quote was what I needed,” Stein wrote. “OK, I thought... No one is looking at you; to think they are is the worst form of solipsism.”
But we less shy types could use a blast of that harshness, too, I think. Send the thank-you note. Make contact with the grieving friend. (Worrying that doing so will “remind them” of their bad news is another classic case of egocentrism.) Sign up for the volunteering you’re worried you’ll be no good at. And send back the food, if you must. It’s all very well to be unassuming, but sometimes you need to get over yourself.
Read
Nicholas Epley’s book Mindwise explores how we routinely go wrong in decoding what’s going on in other people’s heads – and why it’s so tempting to imagine that they’re feeling or thinking what we’re feeling or thinking ourselves.
