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Embarrassment, a possibility in every face-to-face encounter, demostrates some generic properties of interaction. It occurs whenever an individual is felt to have projected incopatible definition of himself before those present. These projections do not occur at random or for psychological reasons but at certain places in a social establishment where incopatible principles of social organization prevail. In the forestalling of conflict between these principles, embarrassment has its social function.
Erving Goffman (Thu,) studied this question.