How does shame affect your behavior?
Daniel Sznycer, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Psychology, Arizona State University. Affiliated with the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, determines that while shame may be an ugly feeling, it can actually have some benefits in guiding us to better decisions in the future.
I am an evolutionary psychologist conducting research on the psychology of sociality. I combine methods, theories, and concepts drawn from the cognitive sciences and evolutionary biology to explore and map the evolved design of social emotions and their underlying motivational systems. I have multiple lines of cross-cultural evidence on shame, pride, compassion, and envy, and their roles in altruism, cooperation, social exclusion, and conflict. I am also working to map the system that regulates how much weight one individual places on the welfare of another. I conduct research on how these emotions and motivations regulate political and moral attitudes, and how they shape communication. The methods I use include experimental economic games, decision-making tasks, priming methods, cross-cultural and ethnographic data collection, large-scale representative surveys, and anthropometry.
Shame and Social Devaluation
When people feel shame they hide and destroy incriminating evidence. Confess and apologize? Not so much. Because of these undesirable effects, a prominent theory argues that shame is an ugly pathology. If you look closely, however, you realize that, to the disgraced individual, the cost actually isn’t shame. The real cost is the reputational threat that you risk if others discover negative information about you. Given this threat, natural selection would have crafted an information-processing organ tasked with defending you against devaluation. We think this defense is the emotion of shame. Now, the under-activation of a defense is ineffective: It leaves some threat unopposed. And the over-activation of a defense is wasteful. To avoid these two mistakes, a well-engineered defense should move up or down in lockstep with the magnitude of the threat. This basic engineering principle is seen in many applications: in medicine, pest control, and warfare. We predicted, and found, that this is also true of the shame defense. We conducted experiments in the US, India, and Israel and discovered a very close quantitative match between shame and others’ condemnation or devaluation—even when there was no communication between the shamed individual and others. Now, shame fires together with other emotions such as sadness and anxiety. However, we found that it’s shame in particular, and not these other emotions, that tracks audience devaluation. Amazingly, shame tracks the devaluation of foreign people about as closely as it tracks the devaluation of local people. This tight fit between shame and devaluation is hugely improbable—unless… the mind was equipped with innate knowledge about the “prices” of various shortcomings, which would then calibrate shame and devaluation in tandem. In sum, shame feels horrible, but in fact is beautifully designed system to adaptively guide your choices and make the best of a bad situation.
