Proclivity to intentionally embarrass others and self scales

Abstract

The present study validated the factorial structure found by Sharkey and Hamilton (2011), and extended their research by testing the scale's convergent validity by examining the relationships between the proclivity to intentionally embarrass others and self and a number of personality constructs. One hundred thirty nine University of Hawaii at Manoa students enrolled in Speech Communication classes answered online questionnaires that contained the proclivity to intentionally embarrass others and self, Machiavellian, communication apprehension, social desirability, and gelotophobia scales. The results suggest that increases in communication apprehension were correlated with reports of lower proclivity to intentionally embarrass others and oneself as well as lower proclivity to intentionally use mild face threatening tactics to embarrass others and mild and severe face-threatening acts to embarrass oneself. Results also suggest that individuals high on social desirability will be less likely to intentionally embarrass themselves and to intentionally use severe face-threatening acts to embarrass themselves. The findings in this paper have implications in regards to understanding the types of people who are willing to disrupt the working consensus through the use of intentional embarrassment despite the possibility of negative social sanctioning from other interactants.