The New Yorker:

If you laugh at unfunny jokes, raise your hand too quickly, or can’t decide on your favorite color, you may be exhibiting a fawn response.

By Katy Waldman

It is the afternoon of the fawn. Everywhere you turn, in workplaces and households alike, yearlings with saucer eyes, brown felt noses, and stilt-like legs are wondering if you’re mad at them. The fawn response, as it’s known in some precincts of social media, bundles various forms of ingratiating, people-pleasing behavior. It can manifest in threatening situations, where expressing authentic emotion could elicit a powerful person’s wrath or cruelty, or it might be more banal: laughing at a vindictive supervisor’s unfunny joke, saying you love a gift when you don’t, laboring over the perfect string of whimsical emojis to append to an opinion that you’ve expressed over text. In a new book, the clinical psychologist Ingrid Clayton recalls hearing about the concept and feeling that she’d found a skeleton key for understanding both her patients’ lives and her own. “It was like I saw fawning everywhere,” she writes. “We were having a collective awakening.”

Clayton is the author of one of two recent books that try to release fawners from their plight. Her contribution, the rhapsodic and quirky “Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back” (Putnam), joins the chatty and pragmatic “Are You Mad at Me? How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You” (Gallery), by the psychotherapist Meg Josephson. Both authors are white women who live in California; both have large followings on Instagram. Josephson’s book originated with a viral video in which she summoned for her audience the reassurances that her younger self would have most liked to hear. “They aren’t secretly mad at you,” she promised. “Your mind is lying to you because it’s scared. I know you may have this fear that you’re secretly a bad person and it’s just a matter of time before everyone finds out, but you’re actually safe.” Within hours, Josephson recounts, the post had blown up across social-media platforms, with hundreds of commenters expressing recognition and relief. “Why am I crying?” one user wrote.

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