Does shame really work? I see it come up over and over from a certain subset of posters. They seem to earnestly believe shame works. That if we shame people they will change.
But every time I try to shame someone into changing they just get defensive or go into an avoidant spiral or start self flagellating, none of which consist of the actual behavioral change I wish to engender.
What does seem to work is getting close to them, understanding their problems, earning their trust, helping them to see how their faults are hurting them, entering their control loop, and actively helping them to positively reconstruct themselves. This is hard. So I can see why it can be tempting to jump to the much simpler sounding solution of making them feel bad until they change.
But I suspect that even in shame cultures, the shame is correlative, not causative. It's the stern standard for a specific form of excellence and the availability of social tech that leads to that excellence that changes people in those cultures. The shame emotion itself seems like it can jolt you into realizing you need to change if you didn't know, but it seems unfit for providing sustained motive force towards personal change.
I can’t imagine any scenario of social negative evaluation which does not come with shame, so in my interpretation shame is literally the feeling of negative evaluation by others. It can occur at the micro scale, like if you were to eat a coworker’s lunch because of carelessness, you would feel shame commensurate with how annoying that is for your coworker. If someone didn’t feel shame at that, it would mean that they don’t actually care / haven’t sympathized in their coworker’s inconvenience. An absence of shame means an absence of responsiveness to negative social evaluation. In that sense it’s a necessary part of social learning.
every time I try to shame someone into changing they just get defensive or go into an avoidant spiral
If your friend were talking too loudly in a movie theater, and you told him, he would feel shame (small, briefly), and then correct his behavior, no? That isn’t shaming, but there’s a standard which induces shame. The shame doesn’t last long, but it is memorable so that we remember not to do that thing again. People who don’t feel shame are more liable to repeat social mistakes.
But re: spiraling, I think in some cases shame goes awry and people feel too much shame or feel shame at the wrong thing. Is that kind of what you are referring to? These can be complicated but I don’t know what kind of problem you’re talking about.
The shame emotion itself seems like it can jolt you into realizing you need to change if you didn't know, but it seems unfit for providing sustained motive force towards personal change
If you were to consider shouting out loud at a professor during a lecture, what would you feel? Shame and embarrassment (small shame). That’s actually what prevents you from even considering doing that, though. It’s an instinctive “this is wrong and it’s not even worth thinking about”. It’s not about “living in shame” or anything, which is a disorder. But if promiscuity as an action is negatively evaluated in a culture then it would lead to shame in the person doing it and hence would modify their behavior. An example of this is maybe: in some countries, the age of consent is 18, but in others it is 17. so a 21yo with a 17yo in one country would result in immense shame, but zero shame in a different country. The only difference is the negative evaluation of others, not anything objective.
Mmm. I think our conversation has thus-far been ambiguous. I think English is natively poor at distinguishing 'felt' and 'functional' emotion.
When I refer to shame the emotion, I'm referring to a sort of sharp painful valence that feels a bit like being stabbed.
Regret feels wider, a slower more manageable burn that feels like its seeping through me and performing some sort of backprop operation in my psyche.
Then there's Compassion. Compassion feels more like a slow euphoria, this feeling is associated with modeling the internal structures of a targeted person or object (or I would label it something else, valence be damned) and then the euphoria is blended with the valence predicted by the model of the target. (The euphoria of knowing persists, but I simultaneously feel the target's emotions.)
Embarrassment refers to a valence that isn't even negative. It's a fast euphoria and feeling of increased bloodflow to the cheeks. Sometimes it is accompanied by a sort of panic, which feels stabby in a similar way to shame. But the embarrassment itself is a positive emotion.
So when another person tells me that they are in pain because of something I have done... Mechanistically my mind seems to take the steps of feeling regret, simultaneously looking at the person being unhappy in my model of their present and happier in my simulation of their future, feeling compassion for that future instance of them, and letting that vision flow into the present as my regret changes me.
If I overuse the shame valence, I end up in a state of chronic pain, which is what I believe I am seeing in many other people when they are subjected to shaming. The regret valence too, grows agitated if it's chronically recurring (and justly so. If it's chronically recurring I am chronically doing something wrong and pain grows as a sort of wake up call). But regret can be repeated more often as long as my higher order processes are judging it to be effective. The compassion valence however, is much more sustainable, largely pleasurable, and seems to cause me to become more extroverted the more I use it. Yet it still allows for the similar behavioral shifts in similar contexts. (and can also be used in contexts without regret, such as helping others with pain that I am not the cause of.)
If I imagine shouting out loud to a professor... well I do remember feelings of shame from my own college experience. These were largely damaging though, as I also felt them regarding the prospect of getting questions wrong or raising my hand or saying anything during class whatsoever and they majorly inhibited my ability to participate in lectures.
Looking back and imagining the scenario anew however... I'm sitting in class, the idea to shout at/to the professor spontaneously arises... and... I find the idea funny. Laughable. A vibrant euphoria that feels like a vibrating diaphragm. Then the next thing that happens is I start contemplating what the effects of shouting would be and whether the tradeoffs would be justified in the specific scenario. It would seem that Humor has been slotted into where shame used to be in this social script, and is serving the same purpose of interrupting my thought-flow enough to prevent me from spontaneously shouting during a lecture, while enabling a more productive follow up strategy than the stabby feeling of shame permits.
When I refer to shame the emotion, I'm referring to a sort of sharp painful valence that feels a bit like being stabbed
Perhaps this is shame at its strongest, but there must also be a smaller shame, right? I'm pretty sure smaller shame is just embarrassment. I don’t think embarrassment is typically coded as a "positive emotion". People want to flee being embarrassed. When they talk about their least favorite memories of the week, it will be memories of embarrassment. To me, someone is embarrassed if they leave the bathroom with toilet paper on the bottom of their shoe. Because of this experience, they will double-check their shoes next time, because the shame is mildly painful and memorable. If instead they left the bathroom and entered an important business meeting and embarrassed their team, that transforms into a more serious shame. Sometimes this is colloquially expressed as “being mortified”. This shame may lead them to double-check not just the bottom of their shoes but how they generally approach their appearance and conduct. The shame they feel is the salience that they have damaged their social identity. We can go even stronger: the strongest shame is something like a DUI resulting in a death. This should be an extreme amount of shame that ought to result in a traditional “prayer and fasting”: loss of appetite, no desire to give oneself pleasure, and a natural speaking out and expression of regret and self-hated. But even here, the shame is still instrumental: even a DUI homicide offender should not live in shame in perpetuity, but should have some weeks or months of it and then move on in a forgiven state.
I find the idea funny. Laughable. A vibrant euphoria that feels like a vibrating diaphragm. Then the next thing that happens is I start contemplating what the effects of shouting would be and whether the tradeoffs would be justified in the specific scenario.
Surely this is not an efficient and adapted mindset? This means that if you were bored and wanted a laugh, you would consider ruining the vibe of the classroom. And then you have to do a bunch of mental processes to weigh whether your laugh is worth the negatives. Shame is extremely beneficial in place of this cognitive operation because it immediately induces a social conformity that doesn’t require cognitive operations. Now that’s not always good — sometimes we want to override instinctive shame — but where manners are concerned and where young people are concerned it’s great because it saves our cognitive energy. Imagine if in every social context you had to manually weigh the costs and benefits: do I cut in line here? Do I insult a friend there? Etc. If we have experienced shame before then we know not to do these things without abstract cognition.
So, I've been reflecting on this for a couple of days. My introspection has let me to a few things.
I agree with you that the toilet paper on shoe scenario is a scenario where even I might describe it as "I was embarrassed". In terms of my earlier breakdown of felt emotions though- What I feel in those situations is what I call shame. What my earlier breakdown was referring to as embarrassment is more- the glowy feeling of a cute person flirting with you, or of being seen and safe and vulnerable. But I think we can set this valence aside. It seems to be a separate emotion. I suspect these are fully different occasionally correlated things both called 'embarrassment', and only the one you are describing is really relevant to our discussion of the merits of shame in society.
Looking back on times when embarrassing (in your sense) things have happened to me... they were rather devastating. They felt like being stabbed. And- I find that these experiences have often wound up swept into my shadow. For much of my life I didn't have the emotional management tech to emotionally defuse those memories. I recall a rather materially trivial event, where during some social banter I mixed up the words 'quirky' and 'kinky'. Materially, it was laughed off by the group within seconds, but it stuck disproportionately in my psyche as a painful event that I couldn't think about.
This conversation with you has allowed me to access some other similar memories and defuse the strength of their valence. So thank you.
So- having considered this these last days- I don't necessarily think shame is bad, but I do think that in order for shame to do the work we want it to in society, the subjects of that shame need to know what to do with it. In so-called shame cultures, I expect there's a much better scaffolding for making sure people know what to do with this stabbing feeling, how to regulate it to a useful magnitude, and how to respond to it optimally. And even then... Japan still produces a stream of NEETs, many of which seem to be suffering this over-sensitivity to shame. In America- shame seems like even more of a crapshoot...
I conjecture that any "just add more shame" solution is an oversimplification. A society also needs a refined zeitgeist around how to use shame in order for the effects of adding more to be positive.
As for whether I would ruin the vibe of the classroom in my hypothetical, I might if this were my first rodeo. I don't think Shame is necessary for me to learn from my mistakes there though. The things that I labeled 'compassion' and 'regret' can serve a similar purpose. (though, perhaps they are related to the weaker forms of shame that you posit). Part of the reason that the idea of shouting at the class is funny is because it is unexpected for my mind to output it as an option. My subconscious has already learned structures and biases towards certain classes of thoughts, and this 'yell in lecture' thought is out of distribution and somewhat absurd. But- it's not shame that stops me from thinking it (at least in the present. perhaps it's meaningful to posit a form of 'shadow' or 'dark' shame in the negative space where my mind doesn't go). And- if I were bored I have other tools for that. I can just hallucinate pleasure. I suspect that I can hallucinate emotions more wholly than most people in general... and that this is responsible both for my ability to wirehead just by imagining pleasure- and my ability to have traumatic emotional flashbacks to trivial situations.
In terms of weighing the costs and benefits in every social situation- I think you are correct. Many of my social algorithms do slow down my ability to respond in social situations. But in our current environment that is merited. Taking 10 seconds to respond to a situation really isn't a problem except in a high speed competitive environment. And neither high trust socializing nor deciding when to speak out in a lecture are high speed competitive environments. It's good to play war games sometimes to stay sharp. But outside of that it seems better to take one's time.
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Notes -
Does shame really work? I see it come up over and over from a certain subset of posters. They seem to earnestly believe shame works. That if we shame people they will change. But every time I try to shame someone into changing they just get defensive or go into an avoidant spiral or start self flagellating, none of which consist of the actual behavioral change I wish to engender.
What does seem to work is getting close to them, understanding their problems, earning their trust, helping them to see how their faults are hurting them, entering their control loop, and actively helping them to positively reconstruct themselves. This is hard. So I can see why it can be tempting to jump to the much simpler sounding solution of making them feel bad until they change.
But I suspect that even in shame cultures, the shame is correlative, not causative. It's the stern standard for a specific form of excellence and the availability of social tech that leads to that excellence that changes people in those cultures. The shame emotion itself seems like it can jolt you into realizing you need to change if you didn't know, but it seems unfit for providing sustained motive force towards personal change.
I can’t imagine any scenario of social negative evaluation which does not come with shame, so in my interpretation shame is literally the feeling of negative evaluation by others. It can occur at the micro scale, like if you were to eat a coworker’s lunch because of carelessness, you would feel shame commensurate with how annoying that is for your coworker. If someone didn’t feel shame at that, it would mean that they don’t actually care / haven’t sympathized in their coworker’s inconvenience. An absence of shame means an absence of responsiveness to negative social evaluation. In that sense it’s a necessary part of social learning.
If your friend were talking too loudly in a movie theater, and you told him, he would feel shame (small, briefly), and then correct his behavior, no? That isn’t shaming, but there’s a standard which induces shame. The shame doesn’t last long, but it is memorable so that we remember not to do that thing again. People who don’t feel shame are more liable to repeat social mistakes.
But re: spiraling, I think in some cases shame goes awry and people feel too much shame or feel shame at the wrong thing. Is that kind of what you are referring to? These can be complicated but I don’t know what kind of problem you’re talking about.
If you were to consider shouting out loud at a professor during a lecture, what would you feel? Shame and embarrassment (small shame). That’s actually what prevents you from even considering doing that, though. It’s an instinctive “this is wrong and it’s not even worth thinking about”. It’s not about “living in shame” or anything, which is a disorder. But if promiscuity as an action is negatively evaluated in a culture then it would lead to shame in the person doing it and hence would modify their behavior. An example of this is maybe: in some countries, the age of consent is 18, but in others it is 17. so a 21yo with a 17yo in one country would result in immense shame, but zero shame in a different country. The only difference is the negative evaluation of others, not anything objective.
Mmm. I think our conversation has thus-far been ambiguous. I think English is natively poor at distinguishing 'felt' and 'functional' emotion.
So when another person tells me that they are in pain because of something I have done... Mechanistically my mind seems to take the steps of feeling regret, simultaneously looking at the person being unhappy in my model of their present and happier in my simulation of their future, feeling compassion for that future instance of them, and letting that vision flow into the present as my regret changes me.
If I overuse the shame valence, I end up in a state of chronic pain, which is what I believe I am seeing in many other people when they are subjected to shaming. The regret valence too, grows agitated if it's chronically recurring (and justly so. If it's chronically recurring I am chronically doing something wrong and pain grows as a sort of wake up call). But regret can be repeated more often as long as my higher order processes are judging it to be effective. The compassion valence however, is much more sustainable, largely pleasurable, and seems to cause me to become more extroverted the more I use it. Yet it still allows for the similar behavioral shifts in similar contexts. (and can also be used in contexts without regret, such as helping others with pain that I am not the cause of.)
If I imagine shouting out loud to a professor... well I do remember feelings of shame from my own college experience. These were largely damaging though, as I also felt them regarding the prospect of getting questions wrong or raising my hand or saying anything during class whatsoever and they majorly inhibited my ability to participate in lectures.
Looking back and imagining the scenario anew however... I'm sitting in class, the idea to shout at/to the professor spontaneously arises... and... I find the idea funny. Laughable. A vibrant euphoria that feels like a vibrating diaphragm. Then the next thing that happens is I start contemplating what the effects of shouting would be and whether the tradeoffs would be justified in the specific scenario. It would seem that Humor has been slotted into where shame used to be in this social script, and is serving the same purpose of interrupting my thought-flow enough to prevent me from spontaneously shouting during a lecture, while enabling a more productive follow up strategy than the stabby feeling of shame permits.
Perhaps this is shame at its strongest, but there must also be a smaller shame, right? I'm pretty sure smaller shame is just embarrassment. I don’t think embarrassment is typically coded as a "positive emotion". People want to flee being embarrassed. When they talk about their least favorite memories of the week, it will be memories of embarrassment. To me, someone is embarrassed if they leave the bathroom with toilet paper on the bottom of their shoe. Because of this experience, they will double-check their shoes next time, because the shame is mildly painful and memorable. If instead they left the bathroom and entered an important business meeting and embarrassed their team, that transforms into a more serious shame. Sometimes this is colloquially expressed as “being mortified”. This shame may lead them to double-check not just the bottom of their shoes but how they generally approach their appearance and conduct. The shame they feel is the salience that they have damaged their social identity. We can go even stronger: the strongest shame is something like a DUI resulting in a death. This should be an extreme amount of shame that ought to result in a traditional “prayer and fasting”: loss of appetite, no desire to give oneself pleasure, and a natural speaking out and expression of regret and self-hated. But even here, the shame is still instrumental: even a DUI homicide offender should not live in shame in perpetuity, but should have some weeks or months of it and then move on in a forgiven state.
Surely this is not an efficient and adapted mindset? This means that if you were bored and wanted a laugh, you would consider ruining the vibe of the classroom. And then you have to do a bunch of mental processes to weigh whether your laugh is worth the negatives. Shame is extremely beneficial in place of this cognitive operation because it immediately induces a social conformity that doesn’t require cognitive operations. Now that’s not always good — sometimes we want to override instinctive shame — but where manners are concerned and where young people are concerned it’s great because it saves our cognitive energy. Imagine if in every social context you had to manually weigh the costs and benefits: do I cut in line here? Do I insult a friend there? Etc. If we have experienced shame before then we know not to do these things without abstract cognition.
So, I've been reflecting on this for a couple of days. My introspection has let me to a few things.
I agree with you that the toilet paper on shoe scenario is a scenario where even I might describe it as "I was embarrassed". In terms of my earlier breakdown of felt emotions though- What I feel in those situations is what I call shame. What my earlier breakdown was referring to as embarrassment is more- the glowy feeling of a cute person flirting with you, or of being seen and safe and vulnerable. But I think we can set this valence aside. It seems to be a separate emotion. I suspect these are fully different occasionally correlated things both called 'embarrassment', and only the one you are describing is really relevant to our discussion of the merits of shame in society.
Looking back on times when embarrassing (in your sense) things have happened to me... they were rather devastating. They felt like being stabbed. And- I find that these experiences have often wound up swept into my shadow. For much of my life I didn't have the emotional management tech to emotionally defuse those memories. I recall a rather materially trivial event, where during some social banter I mixed up the words 'quirky' and 'kinky'. Materially, it was laughed off by the group within seconds, but it stuck disproportionately in my psyche as a painful event that I couldn't think about.
This conversation with you has allowed me to access some other similar memories and defuse the strength of their valence. So thank you.
So- having considered this these last days- I don't necessarily think shame is bad, but I do think that in order for shame to do the work we want it to in society, the subjects of that shame need to know what to do with it. In so-called shame cultures, I expect there's a much better scaffolding for making sure people know what to do with this stabbing feeling, how to regulate it to a useful magnitude, and how to respond to it optimally. And even then... Japan still produces a stream of NEETs, many of which seem to be suffering this over-sensitivity to shame. In America- shame seems like even more of a crapshoot...
I conjecture that any "just add more shame" solution is an oversimplification. A society also needs a refined zeitgeist around how to use shame in order for the effects of adding more to be positive.
As for whether I would ruin the vibe of the classroom in my hypothetical, I might if this were my first rodeo. I don't think Shame is necessary for me to learn from my mistakes there though. The things that I labeled 'compassion' and 'regret' can serve a similar purpose. (though, perhaps they are related to the weaker forms of shame that you posit). Part of the reason that the idea of shouting at the class is funny is because it is unexpected for my mind to output it as an option. My subconscious has already learned structures and biases towards certain classes of thoughts, and this 'yell in lecture' thought is out of distribution and somewhat absurd. But- it's not shame that stops me from thinking it (at least in the present. perhaps it's meaningful to posit a form of 'shadow' or 'dark' shame in the negative space where my mind doesn't go). And- if I were bored I have other tools for that. I can just hallucinate pleasure. I suspect that I can hallucinate emotions more wholly than most people in general... and that this is responsible both for my ability to wirehead just by imagining pleasure- and my ability to have traumatic emotional flashbacks to trivial situations.
In terms of weighing the costs and benefits in every social situation- I think you are correct. Many of my social algorithms do slow down my ability to respond in social situations. But in our current environment that is merited. Taking 10 seconds to respond to a situation really isn't a problem except in a high speed competitive environment. And neither high trust socializing nor deciding when to speak out in a lecture are high speed competitive environments. It's good to play war games sometimes to stay sharp. But outside of that it seems better to take one's time.
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