Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views
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What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary?
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Shame is what is supposed to occur after an individual fails to cooperate with the group.
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Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.
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Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.
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humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.
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The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human
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Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system
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Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.
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Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.
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Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas
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It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt
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Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.
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The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.
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The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.
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Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action
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Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.
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five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing
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Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,
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shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
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What if government is not involved in the shaming?
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Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?
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Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
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vertical agitation
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Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely
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But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.
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corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success
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shame and reputation interact
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in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand
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Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
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why we learned to speak.1
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Language
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The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
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allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.
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in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.
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Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.
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Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.
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What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?
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We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.
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what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:
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Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.
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Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves
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Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high
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In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,
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which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.
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Today's world allows for amorphous identities
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It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
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Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.
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Some people have no shame
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shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative
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a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly
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if the payoff is high enough
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There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
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shame is not enough to catalyze major social change
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This is why punishment remains imperative.
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Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.
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Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.
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The role of non-rational mechanisms in convergence - social emotions like shame and guilt
