You Notice Something Embarrassing About Someone. Do You Tell Them? Researchers Found Most People Get This Wrong

In some social situations, I know exactly what I would want someone to do for me, yet when I’m the one who has to speak up, I can still hesitate for a second. dont

Someone has food stuck between their teeth; their lipstick has moved somewhere it definitely shouldn’t be. Their zipper is open, there’s a stain on their clothes, or a piece of toilet paper has somehow followed them out of the restroom. Perhaps they’re about to give a presentation and keep mispronouncing the name of a person they’ll have to mention in front of everyone. dont

You notice it; they clearly haven’t, and suddenly you have to decide: tell them and risk embarrassing them, or say nothing and hope they discover it themselves before too many other people notice.

I’ve always thought I’d rather know, especially if I could fix the problem immediately, but it’s easy to understand why someone might stay quiet. Researchers tested this hesitation, and one experiment showed how reluctant people can be to speak up even when the problem is right in front of them.

The rest of the research gets even more interesting, because the person noticing the embarrassing problem and the person who has it don’t seem to be thinking about the situation in quite the same way. As someone working in communication and public relations, you can imagine I immediately wanted to know more, and because I found the findings interesting, I decided to share them with you. I will also add other interesting angles to the discussion, including studies that prove we misjudge other people’s reactions in various situations.

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Researchers Tested What People Do When They Notice Something Embarrassing

Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer Abel, Juliana Schroeder, and Francesca Gino examined this question in a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across five experiments involving 1,984 participants, they examined how much people wanted constructive feedback and how accurately others predicted that desire.

Before those experiments, however, the researchers ran a field study that recreated the kind of awkward situation we encounter in everyday life. A researcher interacting with participants had a noticeable mark on her face, made with chocolate, lipstick, or a red marker, depending on the condition. The interaction was arranged so that participants had opportunities to look directly at her before completing a survey.

After applying exclusions, 212 people remained in the study, and 155 later indicated they had noticed something on the researcher’s face. Of those 155 people, only four told her, which works out to about 2.6%.

I find the 155-versus-four comparison far more interesting than the percentage alone, because the overwhelming majority weren’t failing to notice what was happening. They saw the problem and still chose not to mention it.

The study was published in 2022, but the question has attracted fresh attention again. Business Insider revisited the research, though it focused on difficult feedback at work rather than the smaller, awkward situations that can happen to any of us.

The Research Went Beyond Food on Your Face or a Stain on Your Shirt

The researchers then examined the same problem in several different ways rather than relying on one unusual interaction with a researcher wearing a mark on her face.

Participants considered awkward situations in which someone could benefit from feedback, recalled real experiences when they could have given or received feedback, and gave feedback to friends. Across the five experiments, people in a position to give feedback tended to underestimate how much the recipient actually wanted to hear it.

The scenarios ranged from small problems someone might correct immediately to feedback with much bigger consequences. Imagine noticing food on someone’s face or a rip in their pants, seeing a typo before an important presentation, hearing someone repeatedly mispronounce a name, or realizing that the way a person is giving a presentation could hurt their performance.

Interestingly, the mismatch didn’t disappear as the feedback became more useful. According to the American Psychological Association’s summary of the research, the more consequential the feedback was, the more likely people were to underestimate the other person’s desire to receive it. The gap was smaller with relatively everyday situations such as food on someone’s face or a rip in their pants.

So we aren’t only hesitating over whether to mention the spinach between someone’s teeth. We may be even more hesitant to say something that could genuinely help them avoid a bigger mistake.

Why Do We Stay Quiet When We’d Probably Want Someone to Tell Us?

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Part of the problem is where our attention goes when we’re deciding whether to speak. If I notice something embarrassing about you, I can immediately imagine the uncomfortable part of telling you: will you feel embarrassed, will I make the situation weird, will you think I’m criticizing you, or will the conversation suddenly become awkward?  

Those concerns focus heavily on what happens after I speak. The researchers found that feedback givers considered possible consequences for themselves and for recipients, but they particularly underestimated how valuable the feedback could be to the person receiving it.

Think about the situation from the opposite side. You walk around for 40 minutes with food between your front teeth, have conversations with several people, smile in a few photos, and eventually discover it in a bathroom mirror. At that point, you may not be thinking, “I’m so glad everyone protected me from five seconds of embarrassment.” You may be wondering why nobody told you.

One Question Changed How People Thought About Giving Feedback

The researchers tested something very simple: getting people to look at the situation from the recipient’s perspective. Participants were prompted to consider a version of the question many of us could ask ourselves in real life: if you were this person, would you want someone to tell you?

That perspective-taking exercise helped reduce the gap between how much feedback givers thought people wanted and how much recipients actually wanted. Another intervention, which asked participants to imagine somebody else giving the feedback, helped too, but taking the recipient’s perspective was more effective.

I like this more than trying to memorize ten etiquette rules for ten different embarrassing situations. If I have food between my teeth, I want to know. If my zipper is open, please tell me discreetly. If I’m about to walk into an important meeting with a noticeable stain that I could hide with my jacket, I’d rather have those awkward ten seconds with one person than find out two hours later.

Staying Quiet Can Have a Bigger Cost Than a Few Awkward Seconds

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The final experiment moved well beyond appearance. Participants were paired during a public-speaking competition, with one person practicing a speech while another listened and had an opportunity to provide constructive feedback.

Once again, people underestimated how much the speakers wanted feedback. More importantly, the researchers found that less constructive feedback led to less improvement in recipients’ performance between the practice and final speech.

I want to point out that there’s a distinction here between embarrassing information and cruelty disguised as honesty. Telling someone they have a typo on the slide they’re about to present gives them information they can use, while telling them you personally dislike the way they dress is a completely different thing. Quietly mentioning lipstick on someone’s teeth lets them correct something they probably didn’t intend, while giving them your unsolicited opinion about their body, clothes, hairstyle, or personality is a different interaction.

Research on advice reception supports making that distinction. A study published in Communication Monographs found that unsolicited advice was evaluated as less useful and was less likely to be implemented than solicited advice when recipients weren’t receptive to receiving advice in the first place.

We May Overestimate How Bad Our Own Embarrassing Moments Look Too

There’s another side to this situation that I think makes the research even more useful. When you’re the person with the embarrassing problem, it can feel enormous.

Perhaps you discover that you had food in your teeth while speaking to several people. You said the wrong name in front of everyone, stumbled badly while answering a question, spilled something on yourself, or made one of those embarrassing mistakes that instantly makes you wonder exactly how many people noticed.

Research suggests we can be poor judges of that part of the situation, too. In four studies published in 2001, Kenneth Savitsky, Nicholas Epley, and Thomas Gilovich examined how people thought others would judge their embarrassing mistakes, failures, and social mishaps. Participants expected people to judge them more harshly than observers actually did.

When the mistake is ours, we experience every second of it from the inside, while everyone around us is far less invested in the moment than we are. The stain you discover halfway through lunch can occupy your thoughts for the next hour, while the person sitting three tables away may notice it briefly and then go straight back to thinking about their own conversation.

If you’ve ever felt as though someone was scrutinizing every mistake you made, I’ve looked separately at the signs someone may be judging you and how easily that fear can make you interpret ambiguous social behavior.

The Spotlight Effect Can Make an Embarrassing Problem Feel Much More Visible

Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky studied something called the “spotlight effect,” our tendency to overestimate how much other people notice our appearance and behavior.

In one well-known part of the research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, participants wore potentially embarrassing T-shirts and estimated how many people had noticed what they were wearing. They substantially overestimated how noticeable they had been. Other experiments found a similar tendency when people evaluated how much attention others paid to their contributions during group discussions.

Anyone who has discovered something embarrassing halfway through an event probably knows the feeling without knowing its scientific name. Once you know there’s lipstick on your teeth, it feels as though every person in the room must have been looking directly at your mouth for the past hour. Once you realize there’s a stain on your shirt, it becomes difficult to imagine that anyone could have looked at you without seeing it.

The research suggests our internal spotlight is considerably brighter than the one other people are actually shining on us. We may hesitate to tell someone about a problem because we’re afraid of embarrassing them, while the person who eventually discovers it may overestimate how many people noticed and how negatively they were judged.

A discreet warning can sometimes shorten that entire process.

We Misjudge Other People’s Reactions in Pleasant Situations Too

Feedback research isn’t the only place psychologists have found this kind of social miscalculation. Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns studied what happens when people give compliments, and across five studies, people underestimated how positively recipients would feel and overestimated how bothered or uncomfortable those recipients would be.

I find the similarity interesting because the two situations look completely different on the surface. One involves saying something pleasant, while the other may involve pointing out something embarrassing, yet the hesitation can come from a surprisingly similar place: we imagine the interaction going badly, focus heavily on our own discomfort about saying something, and aren’t always very accurate about how the other person will actually feel.

I recently looked much more closely at how people respond to compliments, including newer research showing that even the few seconds after receiving praise can affect the impression we make. The constructive-feedback research gives us another version of the problem from the other side of the conversation.

So, Should You Tell Someone When You Notice Something Embarrassing?

For small, accidental, fixable problems, I generally want to know, and the research suggests many other people want to know more than we predict.

There’s still a difference between helping and commenting. If someone has food in their teeth, tell them quietly. If their zipper is open, find a discreet way to let them know rather than announcing it across the room. If lipstick has smeared, there’s toilet paper stuck to a shoe, or they’re about to enter a meeting with something easily fixable on their clothes, a short heads-up gives them a chance to decide what to do.

The same principle can apply when the problem isn’t physical. If someone is about to make an avoidable mistake in a presentation, has an obvious typo on an important slide, or is repeatedly mispronouncing a name and you know the correct pronunciation, telling them before the consequences get bigger may be far kinder than staying silent. In a presentation or professional setting, correcting something before they speak can also prevent another problem that might undermine how confident they sound.

How you say it can make a large difference, though. You don’t need a dramatic expression followed by, “Oh my God, you’re going to be so embarrassed.” Give them the useful information, give them some privacy if possible, and let the moment end.

• “You’ve got a little something in your teeth.”
• “I think your zipper is open.”
• “You have a little lipstick right here.”
• “Just before you go in, there’s a small stain on the back of your jacket.”
• “I think that name is pronounced ___, in case you want to check it before the presentation.”

A direct but considerate heads-up can give the person exactly what they need.

When Keeping Your Observation to Yourself May Be Better

Not everything you notice needs to become feedback. A useful distinction is whether you’re pointing out an accidental problem the person would probably choose to correct if they knew about it, or simply giving them your personal judgment about their appearance, behavior, or choices.

Food between someone’s teeth is information they don’t have. “I don’t like that haircut on you” is your opinion. A smudge of makeup they can wipe away is different from commenting on their skin; quietly telling someone their skirt is caught somewhere it shouldn’t be can save them considerable embarrassment, while telling them you think the skirt is unflattering simply creates a new problem.

It’s also worth considering whether they can do anything useful with the information. If you notice something minor that can’t be changed until hours later and telling them will only make them self-conscious for the rest of the event, the calculation may be different.

There isn’t a laboratory-tested rule for every awkward human interaction, and I don’t think we need one. The research gives us a better question to start with: if I were in exactly this situation, would I want somebody to tell me?

Conclusion

I went into this research expecting people to hesitate when feedback could hurt someone’s feelings or involve something fairly serious. I didn’t expect the field experiment to be quite so extreme: 155 people acknowledged noticing something on the researcher’s face, yet only four told her.

The five experiments that followed suggest part of the reason may be that people underestimate how much others value constructive feedback, and the tendency can become even stronger when the feedback is more consequential.

Research on embarrassment adds another piece. When we’re the person who made the mistake, we may expect other people to judge us more harshly than they actually do, while the spotlight effect can make us think far more people noticed the problem in the first place.

So the next time I notice something that somebody can discreetly fix in ten seconds, I know which question I’ll be asking myself: would I want them to tell me?

In many of these situations, yes. I absolutely would.

Frequently Asked Questions About Telling Someone Something Embarrassing

Should you tell someone they have food in their teeth?

If you can tell them discreetly, it’s usually useful information because they can fix the problem immediately. Research on constructive feedback found that people underestimate how much others want this type of information, including in everyday situations involving food on the face.

Should you tell someone their zipper is open?

A quiet warning gives them a chance to fix it before more people notice. Keep the wording simple, avoid drawing anyone else’s attention to it, and move on once they know.

What if the person is a stranger?

The same basic question can help: would the information let them fix an accidental problem they probably don’t know about? A brief, discreet heads-up about food on their face, something stuck to their clothing, or another easily correctable problem can be useful even when you don’t know the person.

What if telling them will embarrass them?

They may feel embarrassed for a moment, which is one reason people hesitate to say anything. The constructive-feedback research found that feedback givers consistently underestimated how much recipients wanted useful feedback, while separate research found that people experiencing embarrassing mistakes often expected to be judged more harshly than observers actually judged them.

Is it always better to point out something embarrassing?

No. Constructive information about an accidental, fixable problem isn’t the same as commenting on every aspect of someone’s appearance or behavior. Consider whether the person would probably want the information, whether they can do something useful with it, and whether you can tell them privately without making the situation bigger than it needs to be.

Violeta Loredana

Violeta-Loredana Pascal is a communications expert, business mentor, and the founder of Earth’s Attractions and PRwave INTERNATIONAL. A pioneer in the Romanian digital PR landscape since 2005, she holds a degree in Communication and Social Sciences from SNSPA Bucharest. Violeta is a senior trainer at AcademiadeAfaceri.ro, where she leverages over 20 years of experience to teach professional courses in PR strategy and workplace productivity. By blending high-level business consulting with a passion for holistic travel and wellness, she empowers solopreneurs to overcome procrastination, build profitable brands, and design a life of purposeful adventure.