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Useful Oddity
Have you ever noticed that when you meet a person in an unusual environment, you feel confused, and sometimes even embarrassed, as if you had spied something very intimate? Following this, there is a desire to pretend that you do not know each other, to go far away, to turn away so as not to be recognized.
For example, you can run into your doctor in line for sausage, reach for the same thing in a second-hand store with a teacher who just gave you a lecture at the institute, see relatives at their work, and, horror of horrors, a psychologist on the beach .
Usually in a day we manage to play several roles without noticing it. The usual roles of mother/father, daughter/son, man/woman, employee, boss/subordinate, master/client and others do not cause strange sensations, precisely because they are familiar. In these roles, we automatically react as prescribed in our internal patterns, closely intertwined with the environment in which they were formed and strengthened. Each role has its own behavior, and there is an expectation of the other’s role behavior.
When we encounter people outside the pattern associated with them, as in these examples, the brain notices the incongruity, which in turn can be associated with inappropriateness, and then embarrassment sets in.
In addition, novelty brings us into the “here and now” state, because the brain needs to evaluate…
