Be Cringe, Be Free: The Psychology of Refusing to Perform
Welcome back to PsyberSpace I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about a phrase that's been floating around the internet for a while now: Be cringe. Be free.
Leslie Poston:It sounds deeply unserious, but underneath the humor is a real question that psychologists have been exploring for decades. Why does being yourself in public feel so dangerous? And when we're afraid of being perceived in that way, is our fear accurate or inflated? It turns out the answer is both, depending on who you are and what the idea of being yourself actually threatens. There's another question underneath that one, and it's the one this episode is going to try to answer: Can visibly being ourselves actually set us free?
Leslie Poston:And can that freedom change anything beyond our own individual lives? My opinion as a researcher is yes. Let's get into it. Sociologist Irving Goffman spent much of his career arguing that social life works a lot like theater. He posited that we have a front stage self, which is the version of us we perform for other people, and a backstage self, which is who we are when nobody's watching.
Leslie Poston:Most of the time, we move between these selves without thinking about it very deeply. You're a different version of yourself at a job interview than you are eating cereal alone on your couch at eleven at night, and that's totally normal. One aspect of this worth noting: that front stage performance of self isn't neutral. Instead, it's shaped by whoever benefits from you giving it. For example, your employer benefits from you performing a productive, agreeable, low drama front stage self.
Leslie Poston:The algorithms we move through every day benefit from a front stage self that's engaging and easy to categorize. And under more extreme political conditions, entire systems benefit from a front stage self that conforms without deviation because deviation is the thing the people behind those systems have built their power by punishing. So when someone tells you to be cringe, be free, they're not really talking about relaxing at a party. They're talking about making a conscious decision about authenticity, refusing to keep giving a performance of yourself that was created for someone else's benefit. That's a bigger ask than it sounds like.
Leslie Poston:Most of us have been giving that performance for so long, we've stopped noticing that it's not authentic. And fun fact, there's a name for what happens to a person when the performance of self runs the whole show, the false self. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote about this. He called it the true self and the false self. His idea was that when a person has to comply with outside demands over and over from an early age, they build a false self whose job is to manage the world, keep the peace, and stay acceptable.
Leslie Poston:Meanwhile, the true self, the part that acts spontaneously and that wants to participate in life without needing permission first, gets tucked away and rarely gets to show up. Winnicott thought this was psychologically costly even when it worked. A false self can certainly be extremely functional. It can hold a job, keep your relationships running, and it looks completely fine from the outside. But he described people living mostly through a false self as reporting a sense of emptiness or even unreality, as if they're watching their own life from slightly outside of it.
Leslie Poston:Not in crisis exactly, just muted. This is the emotional core of why be cringe, be free lands so hard for people right now. It's not really about wanting to embarrass yourself for fun. It's about wanting access to the spontaneous, unfiltered part of yourself that's been hidden for such a long time, paying the price for staying safe, acceptable, and employable. Looking at the psychological cost, it makes more sense that people don't just quietly opt out of the performance.
Leslie Poston:They push back against it hard, sometimes harder than it seems necessary. And there's a reason for that overcorrection as well. Brehm describes something called psychological reactance. His research found that when people feel a freedom is being taken away or restricted, they don't just feel bad about it. They often push back in the exact direction that was restricted and sometimes further than they would have gone if the restriction had never existed in the first place.
Leslie Poston:You're familiar with this. How often have you told someone that they can't do something only to realize you've just made that very thing more appealing to them than it was five minutes ago? Apply that to perfectionism culture and conformity pressure, something I talked about in our episode about the politeness protocol. Years of being told to optimize yourself, brand yourself, stay likable, avoid embarrassment at all costs is a massive restriction on a wide range of ordinary human behavior. Being a little weird, a little too enthusiastic, a little unpolished, well, all of that gets coded as a liability.
Leslie Poston:So be cringe, be free isn't some random meme trend that came out of nowhere. It's more of a collective reactance response. Enough people felt the restriction land on them the same way at the same time, and their pushback took the shape of a phrase that could spread fast and that named something so many of them were already feeling. But reactance only explains the push. It doesn't explain what people are actually afraid of when they hold themselves back in the first place.
Leslie Poston:For that, we're going to need to look at where the fear comes from. Gilbert's social rank theory helps understand this. It's the idea that a lot of our anxiety around social standing comes from a very old system built for tracking your position in a group and avoiding the kind of exclusion that could once be dangerous. That system doesn't know the difference between an actual tribe of 30 people and an audience of thousands online. It fires the same alarm bells either way.
Leslie Poston:There's also an important distinction from psychologist June Tangney's research on shame versus guilt. Guilt is about behavior. For example, if you did something you regret, that feeling tends to motivate you to repair it. Shame is about identity. It's not I did an awkward thing, it's I am an awkward person.
Leslie Poston:And that feeling tends to make people want to hide rather than fix anything or try anything new. Cringe usually operates a lot closer to the feeling of shame than the feeling of guilt. And that's why it works so well as a tool of control. If you are someone or some system who wants to keep people compliant, you don't just punish bad behavior. You make people afraid of being seen at all.
Leslie Poston:That's not incidental to authoritarian movements throughout history. It's their strategy. Mark someone's nonconformity as evidence, quote, they're a lesser kind of person, and you don't need to police every action because people will police themselves. Knowing that the mental alarm system is old and easily hijacked helps explain why cringe anxiety feels so disproportionate to the actual stakes most of the time. Most of the time, but not always.
Leslie Poston:Thomas Gilovich has a well known finding called the spotlight effect, which is that people consistently overestimate how much others notice and remember what they do. If you've ever gotten self conscious exercising in public at the gym, or maybe you've just been walking around your neighborhood and suddenly started feeling too perceived, then you've felt the spotlight effect. In one of his studies, people were asked to wear a slightly embarrassing T shirt into a room of strangers and then guess how many people noticed it. The participants guessed way higher than the actual number. Most people are just too busy managing their own front stage performance to clock yours in much detail.
Leslie Poston:And that's pretty useful information. The fear of standing out is often bigger than the actual risk of standing out. It's not the whole story for everyone, which matters a lot given what be cringe, be free is asking you to give up. Psychologist Elon Meyer developed something called minority stress theory, which draws a distinction between distal stressors, meaning actual external events like discrimination or violence, and proximal stressors, meaning the internalized expectation of rejection and the vigilance that comes with that. For someone with more social insulation, the fear of being watched and judged might mostly be a proximal, somewhat distorted fear, closer to what Gilovich found.
Leslie Poston:For someone whose identity already puts them at real risk, that vigilance is often tracking something accurate, not a distortion that needs correcting. So when we talk about freedom from capitalist perfectionism or a fascist ethos, it's important to say clearly that being free of those restraints doesn't always mean being free of the reaction to dropping them. Some of the fear behind cringe anxiety is inflated, but a small part of it is an accurate read of a genuinely unsafe situation. You have to learn to trust your gut. Telling everyone that they're overestimating the risk would flatten the real difference, and I'm just not going to pretend that that difference doesn't exist, especially for certain groups.
Leslie Poston:There's a bit of research from psychologist Keltner that adds nuance to this topic. Keltner's work found that spontaneous embarrassment the kind that shows up as gaze aversion, a head tilt, a nervous laugh after an accidental mistake actually functions as a kind of appeasement signal. People who display embarrassment after a slip up get rated as more trustworthy, not less, because that display signals they still care about the group's standards even though they messed up. Deliberate political cringe doesn't work the same way. When someone drops the performance on purpose as an act of refusal rather than an accident, it doesn't read as appeasement.
Leslie Poston:It reads as defiance. Well, because that's what it is. And defiance can absolutely build trust and solidarity with people who share your values and who've been waiting for permission to drop their own performance too. But it's also much more likely to provoke a real reaction from people or institutions who are invested in enforcing the norm you just broke. This is powering the nuance to be cringe, be free a lot of people feel intuitively, but don't always have language for.
Leslie Poston:Choosing to be your freest, weirdest, truest self doesn't cancel out the consequences of doing that in a system built to punish it. It just changes what you're weighing those consequences against. So given all that, the question then becomes what actually makes it survivable to keep choosing to be your truest self anyway? For this, we go back to Dessi and Ryan, whose work we've mentioned before. They built something called self determination theory, which identifies autonomy as one of a small number of basic psychological needs alongside competence and connection to others.
Leslie Poston:Autonomy in this sense doesn't mean total independence from other people. It means acting from your own values and interests rather than from a need for someone else's approval. Their research consistently found that people operating from that internal place report better well-being than people whose behavior is mostly regulated by outside pressure, even when the outside pressure version looks more successful from the outside. And that's the well-being case for dropping the performance. But it's not a plan for what to do when the fallout actually shows up, and it will for some people more than others.
Leslie Poston:That's where psychologist Kristin Neff's research on self compassion can enter the conversation. Her studies find that self compassion, meaning treating yourself with the same basic kindness you'd offer a friend who was struggling, predicts resilience after social failure much better than self esteem does. Self esteem tends to depend on comparison and performance. Self compassion doesn't need either one to hold steady. And that's really the tool that makes any of this survivable.
Leslie Poston:Not eliminating the fallout if you're in the group where it might happen and not pretending in a way. Having something steady enough to stand on while it happens. Put together, this is what be cringe, be free actually seems to be asking of people. Not to stop caring what happens to you or pretend the risk isn't real since it is for a lot of people. It's an argument that the performance doesn't protect you the way it promised to and that keeping the performance running has its own psychological cost, even if that cost is a little harder to describe than the cost of dropping the act.
Leslie Poston:So back to the question I opened with, can being yourself actually set you free, and can that freedom change anything past your own life? Every framework mentioned in this episode points to yes. A false self that stays quiet keeps a system of control running exactly as designed. A true self that refuses to perform even at real cost is one less person keeping that system fed. Multiply that by everyone else doing the same thing at the same time, and you've got something that comes closer to a shift than a personal choice.
Leslie Poston:Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace I'm your host, Leslie Poston, off. As always, until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Did you know that you can participate in my postdoc research? One of my projects right now in August 2026 is looking for participants.
Leslie Poston:What we're looking for are people who had a changed or altered sense of themselves inspired by that period during, quote, lockdown in 2020 through about 2022, especially if TikTok, the social media platform, played a role in you discovering something new about yourself or deciding to change how you saw yourself in any way. If you'd like to participate in the study, check the show notes for the link. Your participation is anonymous and will only require about sixty minutes of your time for an interview. Thanks. Hope you sign up.
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