CHAPTER FIVE
The WEIRD View of Shame
WEIRD people, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic ones, are a very unrepresentative group considered over time or even considered at the present time (Markus and Kitayama 1991; Nisbett 2004; Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010; Henrich 2020). Humans have been around for 250,000 years. Literacy is only 5,000 years old, Western-style democracy is at best 250 years old, the Industrial Revolution was 275 years ago, and so on. Even if we ask about representativeness of WEIRD people in the early twenty-first century, such people represent only about 10 percent of the citizens of the earth. Thus, we need to be wary of generalizing from WEIRD samples.
In the case of shame and its bad rap, the dominant view that shame is an “ugly emotion” with bad consequences for the person who experiences it (self-hatred, depression) and for society (shame causes antisocial behavior in the forms of withdrawal and/or anger and aggression) is not drawn from scientific experiments on WEIRD people, which would be bad enough because it would be highly unrepresentative. It comes from two bodies of theorizing that are WEIRD but not based on experiments at all. One source is a development of psychoanalytic theory that begins with Freud and culminates in British American psychoanalytic object relations theory, which is speculative and unscientific. The second source is a research program that emerged in clinical psychology, much of it also inspired by psychoanalytic thinking, which gave us the Test for Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA, which I’ll explore in detail below), and that is bad science.
Psychoanalytic Object Relations Theory
I’ll use Martha Nussbaum’s rendition of the object relations theory of shame because it is clear, logical, and relatively tame in its use of psychoanalytic concepts. Nussbaum’s commendable method for thinking about emotions is to look “closely at the type of emotion in question, asking about its structure, its thought content, and its likely role in the economy of human life” (2004, 13). But I think her critique of shame is implausible and largely overdetermined by a commitment to an implausible theory.1
In Hiding from Humanity (2004), Nussbaum is responding to social critics who propose adding shaming to the law’s dominion. For example, one might signal that a driver was previously convicted of drunk driving by indicating this on their license plate. The proposal that she examines and critiques is that in lieu of, or in addition to, paying fines, doing jail time, losing one’s license, and so on, a society can permissibly and usefully shame people who cross certain lines. Nussbaum is against this on the grounds that “shame and disgust are … especially likely to be normatively distorted and thus unreliable as guides to public practice, because of features of their specific internal structure.” I agree with Nussbaum’s arguments against using shaming, stigma, and humiliation in the law. Shaming and humiliation are almost always wrong for pretty much the same reasons that payback anger and pain-passing anger are wrong. The main aim is to hurt by way of humiliation. Shaming and shame share the same linguistic root but are not close conceptual kin. Shame is not normally produced by shaming or humiliation but by disapproval, disappointment, or anger. Thus, experiencing shame and having a mature sense of shame has no normal developmental or logical relation to the practices of shaming and humiliation. That said, Nussbaum’s view of the nature of shame is such that, were it true, the reader ought to be wary of my aim to revive it, even in less institutionally formal ways than those Nussbaum considers. She thinks feeling shame is closely linked psychically to loathing one’s entire self and also to reactive aggression. I don’t agree with this.
According to Nussbaum, there is a type of shame that she dubs “primitive shame.” Primitive shame is universal, occurring naturally in early childhood when a child discovers that he is not omnipotent and judges himself as a failure. Primitive shame, once experienced, abides as psychic infrastructure for the rest of a human life. Here is the view as Nussbaum develops it (2004, 177–89):
1. A child enters the world and takes “the step from an absolutely self-sufficient narcissism [its state in utero]” to a world in which, quoting Freud, it is “very weak” and “very powerless.”
2. In the first months after birth, a newborn begins to come to the rude realization that it is a separate being, and thus not the only entity that exists, as it moves from the (allegedly) blissful and self-sufficient state of the womb to “an alternation between fullness and comfort and emptiness and torment.”
3. As the realization that it is a separate entity dependent on a caretaker (or caretakers) sinks in, the child starts to experience “some rudimentary emotions: of fear, when hunger strikes and relief is not in sight; of love for the source of food and comfort.”
4. At first the infant’s desires are entirely ego-centered. “His Majesty the baby” wants the mother’s breast exactly when he wants it. There is still no comprehension that there are other subjects in the world with desires besides itself.
5. The narcissistic child is frustrated when he is cold or wet, or when his mother’s breast does not appear the instant he desires it.
6. This frustration flowers into anger directed at the caretaker.
7. In stages 5 and 6 the child is ambivalently attached to the caretaker; there is affection and love mixed with anger and hate.
At this point we are positioned to ask: “Where in this history should we locate shame?” (2004, 182). Nussbaum answers this way, after endorsing the story that Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium, to the effect that humans were once whole, spherical, self-sufficient, and akin to the gods. Zeus responds to this situation by dividing people into two and making them dependent on caretakers (and, in later sexual life, on another person). The fantasy or wish for omnipotence remains, and thus:
8. “Aristophanes portrays shame as a painful emotion grounded in the recognition of our own non-omnipotence and lack of control, and he suggests that a memory or vestigial sense of an original omnipotence and completeness underlies the painful emotion as it manifests itself in life. We sense that we ought to be whole—and we know that we now are not.” Nussbaum adds: “It seems plausible that Aristophanes is right: a kind of primitive shame at the very fact of being human and nonwhole underlies the more specific types of shame that we feel later about handicaps and inadequacies” (2004, 182–83).
9. Primitive shame is the painful response to the discovery that the “whole self” is deficient.
10. The child’s narcissism, which was an admixture of “primitive fantasies of symbiotic merger, omnipotence, and grandiosity” (2004, 185), meets defeat as it discovers its own impotence and neediness. Quoting the psychoanalyst Adam Morrison, “Inevitably, shame follows narcissistic defeat” (ibid.).
11. Nussbaum adds that primitive shame is not dependent in any way on an audience. Its thought content is “I am a failure.”
12. “Shame, in this picture, is an awareness of my inadequacy that precedes any particular learning of social norms, although in later life it will become inflected with social learning.”
13. “A primitive shame at one’s weakness and impotence is probably a basic and universal feature of emotional life.… Thus primitive shame and aggression that accompanies its narcissism may lurk behind a more acceptable form of shame” (2004, 192–93).2
Let’s reflect on this theory of shame. Nussbaum admits that the early analysts were “too inattentive to experimental evidence about infant behavior. They were more like great imaginative artists than like clinicians or experimentalists” (2004, 179). But she points out that several of the theorists she depends on were brilliant pediatricians and clinicians and not simply “great imaginative artists.” This is true. But let’s just look at the merits of the theory as she presents it, not reviewing the considerable credentials of all the theorists who have built that theory.
This theory of primitive and abiding shame suffers from several problems. First, psychoanalytic theories are notoriously vulnerable to complaints about the quality of the underlying evidence, and in particular to concerns about falsifiability: What would an advocate of the theory allow as evidence against the claim that the child is a narcissist who believes it is omnipotent? The general worry is that psychoanalytic theories do not naturally invite scientific testing (Popper 1963; Flanagan 1984, 1992; Grunbaum 1985; Crews 2017). Second, observations of children by those antecedently convinced of the theory are pretty much guaranteed to yield confirmations. If a child is demanding, then if I believe Nussbaum’s thirteen points, this is evidence of narcissism. But confirmations are cheap. Exactly the same behavior confirms other contenders, such as hedonistic theories (child as pleasure seeker) and behavioristic theories (child seeks to avoid aversive stimuli and locate reinforcers). Third, there are a host of incredible claims in Nussbaum’s thirteen-point list that have the common characteristic of overdramatization of the child’s situation. Once the child was in bliss. Really? Does anyone know what intrauterine life is like? Then there is the thought that children have some sort of species memory of once being whole and omnipotent. This explains why they come into the world as narcissists and with overweening confidence. Or, perhaps it is not really a memory of once having been omnipotent,3 but instead it’s that the child is born with a desire for omnipotence. But why think that? Can the child be credibly described as having either grandiose, phyletic memories of omnipotence or grandiose desires for omnipotence? It is not clear that babies have any beliefs, desires, or memories, let alone grandiose or narcissistic ones. A baby’s brain is about three-quarters of a pound in weight and 320 cubic centimeters in volume, and it is not that well connected even to itself. It has about 50 trillion connections, whereas an adult brain has on the order of 500 trillion. People who have grandiose thoughts and genuinely deserve to be called narcissists have brains that are three pounds with a volume of 1,400 centimeters.
So one thought is that this view of the child as narcissist is not really based on observation but rather is a theory-inspired projection back onto infants of a psyche that is literally, mythically, and theatrically inspired. Grandiosity, narcissism, and deep existentially fraught family relations are the stuff of Greek tragedy and myth. It is just not clear that the situation of the newborn or the situation of the newborn and its caretakers, is nearly as psychically complex and as consequentially so as Nussbaum paints it. Note that, according to this view, primitive shame is a universal experience that follows on the discovery that not only are we not omnipotent but we are failures, and this feeling penumbra shadows us, penetrates our thoughts and feelings, for the rest of our lives.
It is not clear on this account how social shame is built on primitive shame, or if it is, how it is. Nussbaum says that primitive shame lies at the basis of later shame “about handicaps and inadequacies.” And she says that “shame, in this picture, is an awareness of my inadequacy that precedes any particular learning of social norms, although in later life it will become inflected with social learning.” The simplest view about how primitive shame and socialized shame connect, which also explains why socialized shame is totalizing (if it was, but isn’t), says this: The primitive shame the child feels is totalizing. It is “I am a failure” shame. Other kinds of shame, shame for hitting your sister, not sharing toys, breaking promises, and so on, either reactivate this totalizing shame or are built out from this totalizing core and embed the totalizing.
But it is easy to explain shame about disability in terms of social perception and judgment, rather than reading it as involving additional wounds to broken fantasies of narcissism and omnipotence. As for learning later social norms for when it is appropriate to feel ashamed, the idea seems to be—depending on what “inflected with” means—that this kind of shame utilizes and thus embeds primitive shame, which is aimed at the whole self and pronounces (perhaps it only whispers) that “I am a failure.”
Is it that once you know you are not omnipotent and have suffered the humiliation of discovering this, you are now sufficiently defeated by your own totalizing failure to measure up to what you thought you were? That now your caretakers, with whom you have a love-hate relationship, can add insult to injury and teach you some more stuff that you, not being omnipotent, can’t do? The picture as dramatized seems to be that once the ego is defeated and one is sufficiently weakened and suffering from primitive shame, caretakers can effectively start instruction in the long list of social and moral dos and don’ts, with the warning that they can humiliate you further themselves and also in the eyes of all those other “objects” (which category now includes people) who have a say in how you are allowed to live. Described this way, it does sound awful and very painful.
The trouble is that all the theatrics are necessary only because they are produced by the theory itself to create the impression that the child is in a sufficiently weighty existential predicament that could result, at point number 8 in the list, in the emergence of shame as the “painful emotion grounded in the recognition of our own non-omnipotence.” Recognizing one’s own lack of omnipotence could come as a shock and disappointment only if one antecedently thought one was omnipotent, only if one was narcissistically deluded. But the thought that the child is so deluded is produced entirely by the theory, not from patient observation and parsimonious theorizing about child development. The theory in the form presented is not taken seriously except by theorists impressed by psychoanalytic models. In psychology and neuroscience departments, it might be taught as an example of a fraught theory, but not as a serious contender for a true, or even plausible, theory of child development.
The good news is that there is no evidence that the varieties of shame, as we see them in ordinary life, need a foundation in anything as exotic as psychoanalytic primitive shame.4 No theory of the descent of shame that takes evolution seriously offers a psychoanalytic theory of primitive shame. Remember, broadly speaking, there are two evolutionary theories of the origin of shame and the nature of protoshame (discussed earlier): One view posits a primitive shame affect system that is attuned to deference to dominant conspecifics (appeasement ritual hypothesis). Another posits a primitive shame system designed to predict which actions and traits will be judged negatively by conspecifics (social devaluation defense hypothesis). The two views are compatible. Furthermore, they permit taking shame itself as a basic affect or viewing shame as quickly assembled from the basic affects for anxiety (of separation), fear (of unusual sounds, punishment, and the like), and sadness (in anticipation of downgrading or social exclusion). These are the psychic atoms from which shame emerges. As soon as shame is assembled, it comes to serve exactly the same functions that it is thought to serve on the first view. It is available to support smooth social regulation and normative compliance. In neither case is the low-level shame system a system that harbors memories of former bliss in an amniotic sea, or narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence that are then dashed and wound the psyche to its core, causing the child to be eternally suspicious that “I am a failure.”
Nussbaum’s theory entails believing that primitive shame is about the totality of one’s being. Remember, primitive shame is the shame I feel about myself when I come to the rude awakening that I am not omnipotent. It isn’t that I did anything wrong. It is that my entire being is unsuited to being who and what I thought I was. I utterly fail at the project that, when I emerged from the bliss of the womb, I thought I’d succeed at. My nature, my self, my life, my projects can never be what I had hoped. I am not what I thought I was.
But shame in most cultures doesn’t work this way. In fact, especially in cultures that use shame as their main socializing emotion, children are not taught, and thus do not normally learn, that the entire self is the appropriate object of shame. There are exceptions—for example, cultures in which certain people, slaves, untouchables, or women are deemed to be deficient human beings. In such worlds, the social message is loud and clear that the whole person—slave, untouchable, woman—is the unit of disregard (Bartky 1990). The message received is the one that is culturally enacted and intended, and it is entirely unwarranted. But normally, shame, like guilt, doesn’t take the whole person as its proper evaluative object, and such cases teach nothing about the internal structure or character of shame, but rather only about the ability of bad people and bad social practices to cause totalizing shame and humiliation about statuses that only deserve respect and love.5
Interlude on Psychology as a Science
My criticisms of psychoanalytically inspired psychology deserve a further short reflection that will also position the reader to better understand the critique I will make shortly about TOSCA, the main diagnostic tool used to measure shame and guilt, and to determine shame-proneness and guilt-proneness.
· Psychology is a young science that began in 1849 in Leipzig when Wilhelm Wundt applied experimental methods to the study of the mind.
· Psychology continues to varying degrees to be influenced by a priori views about the mind that are sometimes assumed rather than tested. Psychoanalytic theories are an example.
· Psychology, especially on the clinical side, continues to have theory proliferation in ways that more mature sciences do not. There are many models of the mind: neo-Freudian, Jungian, behavioristic, existential-phenomenological, computational, neuroscientific, and so on. There is also deep disagreement among personality psychologists, social psychologists, and neuroscientists (Flanagan 1984, 1992; Gardner 1985; Von Eckhardt 1992) about the most important causes of mind and behavior.
· Very recently, psychology’s claim to have discovered general truths about the mind has suffered two important criticisms: First, there is the criticism that most psychological findings are based on WEIRD people and do not generalize across cultures (Markus and Kitayama 1991; Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010). Second, there is the replication crisis, which claims that many classic experiments do not pass inspection when they are rerun (Ioannidis 2005). The latter could be taken to suggest that the original experiments were not scientific or, as likely, that they captured only local, temporally circumscribed generalizations, rather than anything truly general or universal about human psychology. Together, these criticisms are of great importance for the study of moral emotions. WEIRDness should make us worry that findings about the way Americans do emotions of anger and shame (guilt and all the rest) are specific to Americans, but not necessarily true across the board with other populations. This indeed appears to be the case, so the finding that shame leads to what is called “humiliated fury” among Americans does not generally apply to Japanese populations (Boiger et al. 2013; Kirchner et al. 2018).
These observations about psychology should make us especially wary about accepting confident assertions about human psychology without, as it were, carefully checking the answers. In terms of shame’s bad rap, we just saw that part of its reputation is due to the acceptance of psychoanalytic theories that are not experimentally vindicated and, frankly, are implausible. In the case of TOSCA, the most popular tool for investigating shame, which I’ll now discuss, the situation is at least as bad. TOSCA was developed and refined among Americans, an especially unrepresentative kind of WEIRD people. It also assumes or stipulates, rather than tests, the finding that shame is the emotion that involves a global negative self-evaluation of the whole self.
One is reminded of William James’s remarks about the nature of the science of psychology in 1892: “A string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them: but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced. This is no science, it is only the hope of a science.”6
TOSCA
The psychoanalyst Helen Block Lewis, author of Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (1971), worked with neurotic patients who, she judged, suffered disproportionately from problems associated with shame. Lewis promoted the correct view that the shame-guilt distinction did not turn exclusively on the dimensions of public-private or seen-unseen. She thought that the distinction rests primarily on whether a neurotic patient experienced or judged themselves as deficient or whether they judged an action they had done as inappropriate, misguided, or wrong. According to Lewis, shame involves the judgment that “I am deficient,” whereas guilt involves the judgment that something I did was wrong.7 She writes: “At least in our culture, shame is probably a universal reaction to unrequited or thwarted love” (1971, 16). “Shame is an acutely painful experience about the self, in which it feels as if ‘it could die’ or ‘crawl through a hole.’ At the same time that the self seeks to hide and is reduced, it is at the center of experience” (ibid., 197–98).
An ecologically sensitive investigation of the folk psychology of shame and guilt would study, among other things, how ordinary people and psychologists use these concepts, possibly only inside a population (college sophomores, Americans, Catholics, and the like). This has been done and the finding is that among Americans, both psychologists and ordinary folk, “shame” and “guilt” are often used interchangeably (Tangney et al. 1996; Tangney and Dearing 2002; Li, Wang, and Fischer 2004). It has also been found that, among the varieties of shame, most kinds take aspects of the self as their evaluative target, not the whole self. Furthermore, how the self receives an evaluation (from others or oneself) that some aspect or feature of the self is deficient, or could be improved, and thus how painful the evaluation is experienced, depends on what one thinks about prospects for changing and cultivating different aspects of oneself. There is considerable variation in views about the prospects for changing oneself inside cultures, across cultures (Dweck and Leggett 1988; Dweck, Hong, and Chiu 1993), and between cultures (Seok 2017a, 2017b).
For example, I might be embarrassed, even ashamed, that I don’t dribble very well on the first day of basketball practice. How much I improve will depend on whether I have confidence that practice might make perfect. If I think I am constitutionally bad at basketball, I’ll never even try to improve. But even then, if I judge myself to be a total failure basketball-wise, I do not thereby judge myself as a total failure, at least not unless I, or my culture, holds some really strange view about the importance of basketball proficiency. Confucian culture emphasizes the project of self-cultivation throughout a life, even for what we might think are core personality traits. Cultural beliefs and associated practices for self-improvement can make social criticism less painful, as can understanding how desires, traits, and dispositions are parsed.
Another ecologically valid method for investigating the concepts of shame and guilt, as I have suggested, would be to examine different cultures to see how these concepts are used, and also to use the expertise of historians, cultural anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and philosophers to understand the background metaphysical and theological views that partly determine how shame and guilt are conceived.
June Tangney and her colleagues, the creators of TOSCA, will have none of this, even though they admit that neither college students nor psychologists nor clinicians use the concepts of shame and guilt in the way their measure does. What they have done instead is create the most widely used instrument to measure shame and guilt, and shame- and guilt-proneness, by exaggerating Helen Block Lewis’s view that, in shame, “the self is at the center of experience,” and by defining shame as the emotion that takes the entire self as its evaluative object. Quoting Lewis, Tangney and Dearing accept the stipulation that “the experience of shame is directly about the self.… In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done or undone is the focus.” They write that shame involves “a negative evaluation of the global self” (2002).
This is odd. First, as I have just said, shame often takes an aspect of the self, rather than the whole self, as the object of evaluation. In fact, Tangney and others (1996) find that, among American college students, both shame and guilt are often experienced in private and do not require an audience, that there is no difference between shame and guilt as far as motivation to make amends goes (it is common for both), and that students feel both guilt and shame over both specific actions and specific aspects or dispositions of the self. If usage among college students aligned with the dominant theory, one would have expected guilt to be used for behavioral transgressions (for instance, a lie) and shame to be used for characterological problems (being prone to lying). But this is not the case. Furthermore, and most importantly, there is no evidence in these experiments that the concept of shame is associated with “a negative evaluation of the global self.” None.
This makes sense. I might feel ashamed that I am clumsy and thus broke the vase, or that I am not doing very well in calculus, or that my manners are poor, but in each case I can decide to step up my game in the relevant domain and not think that I am bad, or stupid, or deficient. Second, norms governing guilt do recommend it as an appropriate response for acts, but also for habits over which one has control but hasn’t yet gained control. One can feel guilty or ashamed that one is not yet able to stop smoking. Among Catholics, there is a view that one is responsible for bad habits that lead to bad actions, not just for the bad actions. TOSCA is unable to align with these phenomena because of the way it defines shame and guilt. Remember, shame involves “a negative evaluation of the global self” (Tangney and Dearing 2002).
It is important to distinguish two kinds of global evaluation: there is (1) a negative evaluation of the entire person, “a negative evaluation of the global self,” and (2) a negative evaluation of a global trait of the self. So, for example, one might say of a person that he is anxious. This ascribes a global trait in the sense that you say that the person is reliably anxious, and he might also share this view of himself. Even if one views anxiety as unfortunate, one might think the anxious person is wonderful. He might wish he was not so anxious, be somewhat ashamed of it, and work on it. His self-esteem and self-respect might be entirely intact.
Likewise, one might say to a child who is not sharing toys with her sibling, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Context makes it clear that the parent is asking the child to stop the selfishness. The parent is not suggesting that the child feel bad about herself for the person she is. Interpreted this way, shame judgments are potentially self-empowering, not necessarily self-undermining. They do not add fuel to the flame of the “I am a failure” shame that allegedly already burns in everyone’s soul. The child has been informed about what aspects of herself to change, and it definitely doesn’t apply to her whole self.
TOSCA shame answers are mostly global in the whole person sense. Here are a few representative questions from TOSCA (Tangney and Dearing 2002). Answers are to be given on a sliding 1–5 scale, where 1 = not likely and 5 = very likely:
1. You walk out of an exam thinking you did extremely well but then find out you did poorly.
a. You would think: “Well, it’s just a test.”
b. You would think: “The instructor doesn’t like me.”
c. You would think: “I should have studied harder.”
d. You would feel stupid.
2. You are driving down the road, and you hit a small animal.
a. You would think: “The animal should not have been on the road.”
b. You would think: “I’m terrible.”
c. You would think: “Well, it was an accident.”
d. You’d feel bad you hadn’t been more alert driving down the road.
3. At work, you wait until the last minute to plan a project, and it turns out badly.
a. You would think: “There are never enough hours in the day.”
b. You would think: “I deserve to be reprimanded for mismanaging the project.”
c. You would think: “What is done is done.”
d. You would feel incompetent.
Shame answers are d, b, d. Guilt answers are c, d, b. Externalization (b, a, a) and detachment (a, c, c) are the two other response profiles.
Here’s the rub. TOSCA is designed in such a way that guilt answers are the only ones that are epistemically plausible and normatively acceptable pretty much anywhere on earth. The shame answers are always characterologically global, the externalization ones involve never taking any responsibility, and the detachment ones display, not a Stoic or Buddhist detachment but rather that of an indifferent creep. To be shame-prone is to make global evaluations that one is unworthy or an inadequate person, and the prime cause of whatever goes wrong when one is present. Thinking this about oneself is very unhealthy, but it is not what shame is or requires.
The philosophers Corey Maley and Gilbert Harman are interested primarily in the nature of guilt rather than shame, but they also judge that TOSCA is seriously flawed. Here, they are focused on TOSCA’s alleged finding that guilt is a prosocial emotion in its effects, whereas shame is antisocial:
If we look closely at these answer choices, there is a significant problem.… The guilt-indicating answer choices consist of a thought or desire to engage in some kind of pro-social behavior (returning a favor, helping clean up, thinking one needs to fix a broken item). This poses a problem for claims about the pro-social nature of guilt: The very instrument used to measure whether a person is prone to guilt does so by operationalizing guilt as the tendency to engage in pro-social behavior.8
The same sort of point applies to how TOSCA operationalizes shame. TOSCA defines shame as a psychologically unhealthy state that is also epistemically and morally unwarranted—no sensible parent would ever teach their children to think they are defective as a human being every time they are judged to have done wrong, or to have a characteristic that could not be improved by attention and diligence. So it is no real surprise that this research program finds that shame is bad (it is defined that way) and is associated with a host of other negative features or outcomes (Tangney and Dearing 2002):
· Shame “involves a negative evaluation of the global self” (Tangney and Dearing 2002).
· Shame is “acutely painful.”
· Shame is accompanied by a “sense of worthlessness and powerlessness.”
· Shame-proneness is self-focused and correlated with narcissism. “Shame-proneness is positively related to pathological aspects of narcissism.”
· Shame undermines self-esteem.
· Shame, guilt, and empathy “are generally regarded as ‘moral’ emotions that help us ‘keep to the straight and narrow.’ ” But, in fact, shame (but not guilt) reduces empathy. “Shame is an acutely painful experience, involving a marked self-focus that is incompatible with other-oriented empathy reactions.… Our findings indicate that the shame-prone person is not an empathic person.”
· Shame (but not guilt) produces either anger and aggression or social withdrawal and disengagement.
· “Moral emotional style in the fifth grade predicts critical ‘bottom line’ behaviors in young adulthood (ages 18–19).” Shame-proneness predicts drug and alcohol use, risky sexual behavior, involvement with the criminal justice system, and suicide attempts. “Guilt-prone fifth graders were more likely to later apply to college and do community service.… Guilt, not shame, is the moral emotion of choice.”
This cascade of negative consequences of shame is entirely unsurprising given the way shame is operationalized by TOSCA. It is inevitable given the criteria for shame. The definition of shame and the criteria for shame and shame-proneness consistently assimilate negative judgments about global traits to negative judgments about the global self. There is abundant evidence that, even in WEIRD cultures, shame is not typically constructed to take the global self as its object.
Conclusion: Two Dogmas of Shame
Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Fabrice Teroni discuss two dogmas in the shame literature, both of which they think are false. The first dogma is that “shame is an essentially social emotion, ultimately a response to the disapproving eyes of others” (2012, 16). If “essential” means “necessary,” then we have seen that shame does not necessarily require the gaze of another, especially once an individual has a mature sense of shame. That said, I would not want to deny that shame, like guilt, is a social emotion used to build an inner moral sense that suits us as social animals living in communities. Shame protects the sociomoral order, even if it does not require the gaze.
The second dogma is that “shame is directly morally bad in that it distinctively correlates with a variety of insidious emotional conditions and action tendencies.” Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni write, “The Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA) that constitutes the measure employed by most of the studies supporting the second dogma exhibits a bias in favor of guilt and against shame” (2011, 160).
It should be obvious in advance of any testing that people who think they are worthless are mistaken, and that, in addition, thinking this will be very bad for one’s psychological well-being and interpersonal relations. But what does this have to do with shame? Shame in the wild simply isn’t a state of global self-denigration or self-loathing, nor is it “directly morally bad.” If it was, then most people on the earth, but possibly not WEIRD people, would be regulating moral life to some significant degree with an emotion that directly undermines morality, as well as self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-respect. But this isn’t the right conclusion. Shame is an entirely respectable and useful moral emotion, which in itself has none of the characteristics its critics claim.
The project of rehabilitating shame faces strong headwinds. The WEIRD view, as expressed in psychoanalytic object relations circles and in experimental research that uses TOSCA, dominates thinking about shame in academic and clinical psychology in North America. This view has deeply penetrated popular culture. It is the official view in circles that read magazines like Psychology Today, InStyle, Shape, and Women’s Health, and it dominates daytime TV shows like Dr. Phil, Ellen, and the View. Addiction is caused and then sustained by shame. Eating disorders are caused and sustained by shame. Except it isn’t true. Or it has an element of truth in it, which is only this: There is a variety of shame that is global and that undermines self-esteem and self-respect. It is encouraged by misanthropes, racists, sexists, queerphobic individuals, and ableists, and it is totally unwarranted.
This kind of ugly shame is not a variety of ordinary shame, and is certainly not a variety of shame that can be morally certified. It is cruel and always overreaches because no person is ever deserving of global disdain. However, there are many kinds of shame, as well as several personal and social roles for shame, that are good—good for the individual who has a proper sense of shame, and good for societies in which such a sense is cultivated. Having finished the argument against those who wrongly think shame is always ugly and destructive, in chapter 6, I’ll proceed to give the positive argument for shame.