When you trip in public or walk into a glass door, laughing it off makes a better impression than turning red. Across six experiments, people who showed amusement at a harmless blunder were rated warmer, more competent and more authentic than people who showed embarrassment.
The research is by Selin Goksel of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Ovul Sezer of Cornell University and Jonathan Z. Berman of London Business School. It was published online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on February 26, 2026 (doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000477). All six studies, with 3,204 participants in total, were preregistered.
Blushing versus laughing
In the first study, 592 participants imagined meeting a friend’s cousin at a dinner party who told a story about an everyday faux pas, such as tripping on the street. In one version the storyteller looked away and went red. In the other, the storyteller laughed and made fun of themselves.
The laughing storyteller was judged warmer, more competent and, by a wide margin, more authentic. Later studies that used photos of amused or embarrassed faces, and blunders witnessed as they happened, pointed the same way.
A third study showed that sharing a faux pas and laughing it off improved a person’s reputation compared with not mentioning it at all, while sharing it with visible embarrassment lowered perceived warmth. Amusement did not significantly change judgments of morality in the early studies.
Why embarrassment backfires
Both reactions serve a similar social purpose. In study five, amusement and embarrassment signaled appeasement equally, showing the person respects social norms and meant no harm.
The difference lies in calibration. Observers saw embarrassment over a trivial slip as excessively self-conscious. Amusement signaled that the person correctly judged the mistake as harmless.
When laughing goes wrong
The picture flips when a blunder hurts someone else. In the sixth study, people who laughed after a faux pas that harmed others were seen as showing too little concern for them. As harm increased, the benefits of amusement shrank or reversed, and embarrassment became the better-calibrated response.
The authors list limits. The studies used hypothetical scenarios with U.S. Prolific samples, one-off interactions and character ratings rather than behavior, so real-life effects may differ.
The practical rule they offer is simple: laugh at the glass door, not at the coffee you spilled on someone else.
Study Details:
- Title: Transcending embarrassment: On the reputational benefits of laughing at yourself
- Authors: Selin Goksel, Ovul Sezer, Jonathan Z. Berman
- Journal: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Publication Date: February 26, 2026
- DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000477