The shame game
Moral emotions have long been used to change people’s behaviour, but is shaming still relevant in modern society?
By Jörg Wettlaufer
Follow Jörg on Twitter @joewett
Institutionalised shaming is becoming fashionable again. Since the early 1990s, we have seen restorative justice experiments with so-called reintegrative shaming; official authorities use online pillories to inform the public about offenders in the neighborhood; and very recently, the environmental movement has rediscovered the normative power of shame in its battle against the destruction of the greatest common good of mankind, our planet. What is this almost-forgotten weapon about, and can it do good in our modern and constantly changing world?
Let’s consider first how shame, the underlying moral and self-conscious emotion, is understood today. Of course, one will find many different definitions in the relevant disciplines, but there are also some aspects that most scientists agree upon nowadays. It is undisputed that shame is an unpleasant feeling; an emotion with a strong bodily component. It is very probably caused by an interaction of the limbic system with the orbitofrontal cortex that acts directly on the sympathetic nervous system and causes blushing, as neuroscience tells us. But there are more visible signs of shame.
In shame condition, people lower their faces, drop their shoulders and give the impression that they want to vanish into the ground, presumably because it is rooted in appeasement behaviour already known in primates. Therefore, one can distinguish between a phylogenetic older appeasement- shame and a younger conformity-shame: two different sides of the very same emotion as proposed by Daniel Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Deep-rooted
This distinction is supported by linguistic evidence. Shame is a universal pan-human emotion and the blush is present in all cultures and ethnic groups. Given how deeply this emotion is rooted in the human nervous system and brain, there is no doubt that it has been selected as part of evolution and thus is a functional adaptation. Cooperation is a very likely candidate for the selection pressure that shaped the ability to feel shame, because it is an effective but not physically wounding punishment for non-conformity to the norms of a group that one is identifying with. This makes shame culturally flexible (with no fixed rules on what to be ashamed of), yet effective in all possible environments and groups of all sizes that share common norms and moral standards.
Briefly, we can say that shame consists of a physical reaction to a transgression of cultural norms, and is elicited by behaviour that is deemed inappropriate in terms of in-group norms. But how do we learn about these rules and know what to be ashamed of? Following such rules is a skill that is learned during infancy and childhood through good examples or shaming by a caregiver. This is universal and can be found in all cultures, although some East Asian and Pacific cultures seem to play on the use of shame in education more than others. At the end of adolescence, the most important threshold to becoming an accepted member of the group of adults is not sexual maturity but the ability to control body and mind according to the rules and norms during infancy and adolescence, in order to perform as an effective member of the team. As opposed to guilt, shame always affects a person’s identity as a whole.
Nudity, in the sense of not wearing a distinctive cultural marker, is associated with shame in all traditional cultures because it presents the body in its natural state — which lacks the distinctive feature of humankind, the alteration caused by the apple from the tree of knowledge — as the Bible puts it.
Nude bodies remind us of the natural layer upon which humanity is built, as they react to stimuli from a basic domain of life that even a strong tool like shame for self-control cannot easily cope with: sexuality and procreation. This shame – related to the human body – can also be understood in terms of consciousness about the additive character and fragility of emotion-based normative control that guides humans in their social relationships and makes interactions so different from what the great apes, for example, show us. At least it gives us the possibility to act differently.
In science and humanities, shame and humiliation are considered to have a function in society, at least since Adam Smith’s study of moral emotions in 1759. Looking back further to Genesis and the Bible makes it evident that this perspective was not totally new in the 18th century. But the relationship between the emotion shame and the very human ability for cooperation in large groups has been a matter of scientific research for only about 20 years.
Widespread use
This functional link between shame and cooperation is worth exploring in more detail with the help of empirical evidence from European historical societies. In the high and late Middle Ages, from 1100 AD onwards, shaming punishments were widespread throughout Europe, from Portugal to Poland, Sweden to Sicily. This calls for some explanation, and also enables us to look empirically at how historical societies made use of shame and the possibility of imposing this emotion in the name of law and order on individuals. At the same time we can observe if the effect was as desired and why the practice was given up during the 18th and early 19th centuries in most parts of the western world.
In Europe, shaming punishments and customs of reprimand have a long history dating back to classical Greece and probably far beyond, but in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, they were established in public penal law and attained an official character. Such formalised shaming punishments seem to originate in the educational mandate of a powerful institution that looked to establish both general and special prevention (deterrence and reformation). European cultures, like others, put considerable value on the concept of honour or public fama in the given period, as well as on the integration of the individual into group structures.
In recent years, a debate about the influence of church law on the development of public penal law in the European high and late Middle Ages has shed some light on the strong interconnections between theological discussion about penance and the practical execution of law in this period. It has become clear that secular penal law borrowed in many ways from ecclesiastical law, and the emergence of some ‘new’ forms of punishment, for instance the institution of the pillory in the second half of the 12th century, can only be understood in this context.
Public confession
During the 12th century, the pillory appears in the constitutions and liberty charters of townships (which were granted by bishops and other clerics), incorporated into light correctional penalties. Furthermore, during the 12th and 13th centuries, the pillory turned into a device for public confession in the presence of laypersons, thereby joining an induced or even forced penitential shame to allow for the subsequent reconciliation of the offender within the group. The pillory, or public exposure in the marketplace for misdemeanours or sins committed in public view of a township, combined the practical aspect of promulgating important information about violators of communal peace with the Christian goal of forgiveness through penance. Shame was, at this time, a well-established part of penance and confession.
Medieval European citizens heavily relied on Christian values and cooperative behaviour. Loyalty to the community had to be promised by oath, and mutual trust was a core element of daily life. To a significant degree, shaming punishments were used to punish defection and misdemeanour that were relevant for cooperation, especially in the high Middle Ages. We can observe an emphasis on perjury, fraud and adultery, ignominious words, blasphemy and, later, theft. The baker was punished with the tumbrel or dunked into mud for baking bread that was too small, the fishmonger was put in the pillory for selling rotten fish, and so on. Moral failure in the eyes of the community to which one belonged was punished with shame, if money did not do the job of altering behaviour in the first instance. It was and is crucial for the function of shaming punishments that the shamed person identifies themselves with the values and norms of the group. In this perspective, the rise of shaming punishments in western Europe during the Middle Ages was, notably, due to the development of the cities as units of identification, which people belonged to the most, apart from family ties.
However, public shaming did not evolve in the way it was originally intended by judges who were inspired by the Christian tradition of public penance and confession. Very early on, the pillory became an instrument of stigmatisation and exclusion rather than one of reconciliation or reintegration. The stigmatising character of shaming punishments continued to have a predominant effect on these punishments (also called ‘honourific’ to denote their long-term consequences). Only later, during the 16th and early 17th centuries, do we observe a movement towards reinforcing the penitential and ‘confessional’ character of the pillory, through the reintroduction of a ‘new’ instrument known as the iron collar (halseisen in German, carcan in French), which differed from the original pillory only with respect to the lack of infamy attached to its use. Ironically, the iron collar was also soon associated with the same stain of infamy.
Modern society
Coming back to modern times, what can we learn from the experiences of our ancestors? Can we learn anything at all, as the situation in modern society seems at first glance totally different from what made up a medieval town in the 12th or 13th century? First of all, the historical evidence seems to prove the theoretical framework of shame supporting cooperation in a very literal sense: shaming was used in conflicts where somebody did not behave according to the very basic learned norms and moral values around justice and mutual trust. People endangering the peace of a town and cheating their neighbours where often shamed and later expelled, sometimes banned forever from the town or territory in order to preserve the conditions seen as required for strong cooperation within the community. Moral emotions were thus for a certain period of European history an important building block for effective cooperation in groups relying on mutual trust.
Shame can indeed be a strong incentive to alter behaviour; it can effectively remind a person of shared norms and help them to regain control over body and mind in the way it was learned during childhood. In medieval literature, shame was often referred to as a kind of confusion of the mind, which allows for reorientation. Shame may even help to break the vicious circle of drug abuse or other dependence. But it only works if everybody agrees on the norms, and if the culprit identifies themselves with the norms of the group. This is in fact no longer the case in pluralistic societies with very heterogeneous norms and values. While adultery (literally “violation of conjugal faith”) came top in leading to persecution with shaming punishments in the Middle Ages, nowadays there is no such normative understanding of this behaviour. Shaming with the positive intention of reformation works best in small face-to- face groups, where everybody knows everybody and values are shared. This feature is made use of in restorative justice, where offenders are shamed within their peer or family group. But there is considerable difference between a reintegrative shaming conference held in modern Australia and sitting in the pillory in a medieval market.
What is the potential future of the social usage of shaming? In fact the modern pillory stands no longer at the marketplace, but can be found in its modern counterpart, the internet, where people can shame and blame others on social media. Here we have, in contrast to medieval times, a potentially unlimited public and — more importantly — no judge to reflect about the ‘sentence’ or feel responsible for decisions. One thoughtlessly posted photo or tweet can destroy whole lives. Shame is still a powerful weapon and should therefore be used carefully and with consideration, if used at all. The online pillory reminds us that it can also be a spectacle for the onlookers and bystanders to shame and humiliate others; all the more so, as the reaction of the victim is not directly visible any longer.
Looking back at history, shame does not seem to be the right tool with which to save the environment and the earth. One would be better off trying honour, which seems to perform — according to recent findings in game theory experiments — as well as, and even better than shame to motivate people not to cheat on values needed for cooperation.
This article originally appeared in the RSA Journal Issue 4 2015
