Understanding the visual perception of awkward body movements: How interactions go awry

Dyadic interactions can sometimes elicit a disconcerting response from viewers, generating a sense of awkwardness. Despite the ubiquity of awkward social interactions in daily life, it remains unknown what visual cues signal the oddity of human interactions and yield the subjective impression of awkwardness. In the present experiments, we focused on a range of greeting behaviors (handshake, fist bump, high five) to examine both the inherent objectivity and impact of contextual and kinematic information in the social evaluation of awkwardness. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to discriminate whether greeting behaviors presented in raw videos were awkward or natural, and if judged as awkward, participants provided verbal descriptions regarding the awkward greeting behaviors. Participants showed consensus in judging awkwardness from raw videos, with a high proportion of congruent responses across a range of awkward greeting behaviors. We also found that people used social-related and motor-related words in their descriptions for awkward interactions. Experiment 2 employed advanced computer vision techniques to present the same greeting behaviors in three different display types. All display types preserved kinematic information, but varied contextual information: (1) patch displays presented blurred scenes composed of patches; (2) body displays presented human body figures on a black background; and (3) skeleton displays presented skeletal figures of moving bodies. Participants rated the degree of awkwardness of greeting behaviors. Across display types, participants consistently discriminated awkward and natural greetings, indicating that the kinematics of body movements plays an important role in guiding awkwardness judgments. Multidimensional scaling analysis based on the similarity of awkwardness ratings revealed two primary cues: motor coordination (which accounted for most of the variability in awkwardness judgments) and social coordination. We conclude that the perception of awkwardness, while primarily inferred on the basis of kinematic information, is additionally affected by the perceived social coordination underlying human greeting behaviors.