Why is LinkedIn So Cringe? - Part 1

Defining cringe and its dimensions

Cringe: it’s easy to spot but hard to define. Cringe is not just embarrassment. Or disapproval. Picture someone singing with unshakable confidence on a national talent show, when it’s painfully clear to everyone else they shouldn’t even subject their family to this horror. The cringe doesn’t come from the bad singing but from the implied self-assuredness, which betrays a profound lack of self-awareness and social calibration. Cringe lives in the chasm between how someone sees themselves and how others perceive them. Cringe is the emotion invoked in others when they witness unsuccessful attempts to gain social status that, ironically, result in a loss of social status for the subject.

As someone whose humor is often described by my less-than-refined friends as “optimized for volume,” I can attest that a raunchy one-liner that flops won’t ruin you. The momentary awkwardness of a failed joke usually fades quickly, especially if everyone acknowledges the misfire. But for those who love telling long-winded stories and consistently miss the mark, the cringe hits harder. The more air time you take up, the more social capital you’ve staked. More importantly, when the performer remains oblivious to their failure despite social signals, cringe will envelope the rest of the room, almost seeming to compensate for the subject’s lack of embarassment.

Consider an encounter I had on the New York City Subway: a 300-pound, middle-aged man sporting oversized sunglasses belted out a bizarre rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun. The word “sing” might be generous—he’d pause for 30 seconds of silence, then bellow “GIRLS,” followed by a three-second pause and a whispered “…just wanna have fun.” The passengers held it together, sensing he wouldn’t appreciate laughter. Yet, despite the oddity, I didn’t cringe. Why?

Our subway characters aren’t exactly projecting a stellar image. They also happen to be some of the most self-assured people I’ve met, suggesting a gap between self image and image. But the subway performer isn’t in any serious way trying to climb the social ladder. Their performance can’t fail to win approval because winning approval was never plausibly on the table. Cringe only comes with failing at the game everyone else is playing.

The intensity of cringe scales with how much someone appears to care about their social standing and how deliberately they act to enhance it. When their effort misfires, the magnitude of the failure—and the cringe—depends on the degree of their social miscalibration. A specific blind spot, like overestimating your singing or athletic ability, can be written off as a quirk. “We’re all deluded about something”.

But when the failure reveals a broader lack of social intelligence or broken social radar—cringe is maximized. This happens when someone’s high-effort attempt to shine, meant to showcase their best self, has the opposite effect, exposing their obliviousness to how they’re perceived.

I sometimes experience flashbacks to things I’ve done in the past that I now recognize as “cringe” and the feeling is so overpowering that I have to will myself to stop. But qualitatively, the feeling is no different from cringing at someone else’s behavior. I wonder if the purpose of cringe then is to send a strong negative signal to oneself to avoid own-goals that result in a loss of social status.

With that primer on cringe out of the way, stay tuned for part 2 in which I’ll discuss incentives and signaling on LinkedIn, a platform which seems engineered to amplify almost every dimension of cringe.