Walking past a woman raising money for charity the other day, I found myself patting my pockets apologetically. The gesture, born of disappointing panhandlers and street performers, is the international code for “Sorry, I don’t have any change.” It made no sense. She was undoubtedly not after a dollar or two; she wanted my email address, my credit card details, a direct debit form. The lack of cash made no difference to her. 

It is not the only empty gesture I make to fundraisers. On other occasions I’ll speed up, looking at something in the distance, or put my phone to my ear, pretending to have an urgent call. Why am I so embarrassed to simply say “no” in this situation? I don’t owe these people anything. Yet some part of me is obviously determined to be thought of as someone who would donate to every single person who asked, if only I was not so temporarily inconvenienced by this phone call.

Such are the countless tiny gestures we make in public to save face from some imagined embarrassment. The fake phone call may be the most widespread ploy, but it is far from the only one. There’s the little hop and skip to right yourself when you trip on a loose bit of sidewalk, as if it was all part of a well-planned micro parkour routine. Or the accusing look you give the piece of sidewalk in question, as though it had been lying in ambush. Why do we do this? We all trip sometimes, and it is not always the pavement’s fault. 

After all, the truth is that most people will be far too wrapped up in their own anxieties to have noticed, but then this kind of public pretending is not really about other people. In his 1955 essay “On Face-Work,” the sociologist Erving Goffman identified the need to live up to our own standards of self-image. Because you don’t want to be thought of as someone who gets lost, even when you’re alone in public, you would rather pretend to have received a text message telling you about some sudden change of plan, rather than just wheel about and course correct. You want to be perceived as a courteous person, so you will hammer the “door open” button for someone running for the elevator or the train, even if you know the doors are closing and the button will have no effect.