It’s an ineffective tool if your goal is change.
Ask Troy Hunt: https://www.troyhunt.com/the-effectiveness-of-publicly-shami...
Shame is so effective when it actually lands that you can never fully deprogram it -- I will live with my Catholic guilt for the rest of my life.
This is why words have meanings. Companies aren't people and hence "shaming a company" can't possibly mean "shaming the legal entity" because that's nonsense but instead shaming the humans that make up that legal entity. Saying such a thing is impossible actually treats the company as an autonomous metamind.
I interpreted what you said as nonsensical and I'm making that your problem isn't really an argument.
Prejudice is rooted in lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity. Racism is familiar and has it's own body of knowledge; all wrong, but vehemently defended. Racists try to build their own narrative.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." Jean-Paul Sartre
As a tool for oppression however, yes it's quite effective.
Sure, but large businesses entities (as opposed to individuals) often cannot afford such luxury.
Try being a bank in a western country and ignoring a public security blog post, outlining exactly how one can exploit your online banking auth flow to gain unauthorized access to customer accounts.
Risk of what? Risk of losing credibility and revenue due to… people shaming them, perchance?
> According to cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, shame arises from a violation of cultural or social values while guilt feelings arise from violations of one's internal values.
> In sum, shame and guilt refer to related but distinct negative “self-conscious” emotions. Although both are unpleasant, shame is the more painful self-focused emotion linked to hiding or escaping. Guilt, in contrast, focuses on the behavior and is linked to making amends. [0]
shame as a tool of change does not work on the person being shamed at the time, it works on that person for the future hopefully as they will be afraid to be shamed again and it works on changing the behavior of other peoples because they don't want to get shamed either.
Thus as a tool of oppression, as you pointed out, it works great. But also as a tool for enforcing otherwise non-enforced social rules - until of course you meet someone shameless or who feels at least that they can effectively argue against the shaming.
This is backed by studies.
"Using three different emotion inductions and two different dependent measures, we repeatedly found that endogenous shame motivates prosocial behavior. After imagining shame with a scenario, proself participants acted more prosocially toward the audience in a social dilemma game (Experiment 1). This finding was replicated when participants recalled a shame event (Experiment 2). Moreover, when experiencing shame after a failure on performance tasks, proself participants also acted prosocially toward the audience in the lab (Experiment 3). Finally, Experiment 4 showed that this effect could be generalized beyond social dilemmas to helping tendencies in everyday situations. Therefore, it seems safe to conclude that shame can be seen as a moral emotion motivating prosocial behavior." [1]
You can also contrast 'humiliation' shame with 'moral shame', with moral shame being prosocial. This is also backed by studies.
"Our data show that the common conception of shame as a universally maladaptive emotion does not capture fully the diversity of motivations with which it is connected. Shame that arises from a tarnished social image is indeed associated with avoidance, anger, cover-up, and victim blame, and is likely to have negative effects on intergroup relations. However, shame that arises in response to violations of the ingroup’s valued moral essence is strongly associated with a positive pattern of responses and is likely to have positive effects on intergroup relations."[2]
[1] de Hooge, I. E., Breugelmans, S. M., & Zeelenberg, M. (2008). Not so ugly after all: When shame acts as a commitment device.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(4), 933–943.
[2] Allpress, J. A., Brown, R., Giner-Sorolla, R., Deonna, J. A., & Teroni, F. (2014). Two Faces of Group-Based Shame: Moral Shame and Image Shame Differentially Predict Positive and Negative Orientations to Ingroup Wrongdoing. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(10), 1270-1284.
A 2021 meta-analysis showed that, “shame correlates negatively with self-esteem and is large effect size.” [0] So unless the goal of your shame is to actively harm the people involved, then no, shame is not an effective tool at behavior change, given the damage it causes.
You may be thinking of “guilt” rather than shame:
> In sum, shame and guilt refer to related but distinct negative “self-conscious” emotions. Although both are unpleasant, shame is the more painful self-focused emotion linked to hiding or escaping. Guilt, in contrast, focuses on the behavior and is linked to making amends. [1]
One has to do with self-esteem, which has nothing to do with whether it is pro-social or beneficial, just that some types of shame harm self-esteem, which was never contested.
The second study is about criminal populations, and I specifically mentioned that shame is about self-policing, and that obviously didn't work if someone is incarcerated for a crime.
And criminals aren't some ungovernable animals...
Yes, your self esteem will likely be harmed if you do something bad and it gets found out.
> And criminals aren't some ungovernable animals...
?
Shame makes people feel bad, so we must do all we can do avoid making anyone feel that.
What's next? Is "disappointment" next? Having someone disappointed in you feels bad, therefore no one can ever show disappointment to others?
As you are demonstrating, shame is more about causing pain than changing behavior. You seem to want to hurt people, and that’s one reason why shame is not effective. You don’t care that equally or more effective means exist for improving behavior.
> So you admit that shame can be bad? Then you’re close. Next you need to realize that shame’s effectiveness is dependent on a person feeling shame the way you want them to. But that’s not how it actually works, is it? Instead, shame is sourced from the judgements of others, so one way of effectively mitigating shame is to hide the behavior from others, rather than stopping it. So shame is ineffective.
I never claimed that shame couldn't be bad -- I said it is essential for society to function properly. I cited two studies which demonstrated that shame can be prosocial and beneficial depending on circumstances.
> And I’m not being silly. You tried to dismiss the legitimacy of my citation by dismissing an entire category of people. That was inconsiderate.
I dismissed your studies because they were both irrelevant to my point and did not contradict anything I cited. If you feel that I am othering prisoners because I said that the situation of the people in the study made it useless to make your point, then I object to that and say that you are grasping at straws since you have no reasonable argument otherwise.
Look, you have every right to be absolutely wrong in this case, so don't bother changing your mind or looking at my actual standing on the issue and instead imagine I am some kind of meany pants who wants people to feel bad if you want, but I am done with this conversation.
And one of the clearest indicators to me that a person knows their argument is weak is when they declare themselves correct (or me wrong). Of course I’m free to be wrong, the problem you have is you’ve done a terrible job demonstrating that fact.
(See how your attempt at shame failed? That's why shame is not a useful tool.)
Even if you think I am an asshole, self-reflection can only be beneficial. One thing that may be helpful is to take a look at your actions over the thread and think about it from the other perspective, and seeing how you may appear from someone else's point of view. I do that often and though it isn't always pleasant, it does give a reality check in some key areas.
Refusing to acknowledge that other people have valid arguments and continuing to repeat the same thing over an over again is indeed 'unbeatable'.
People then ceasing to continue to argue with you because you aren't listening to them is them recognizing they are wasting their time.
And you made a value judgement about the people who end up in jail/prison, which was completely uncalled for.
> And you made a value judgement about the people who end up in jail/prison, which was completely uncalled for.
You are being silly.
And I’m not being silly. You tried to dismiss the legitimacy of my citation by dismissing an entire category of people. That was inconsiderate.
You are correct that I didn't provide supporting reasons myself. Fair point. I suppose I didn't think your comment warranted it. Saying that might come across as harsh, which isn't my goal. I'd rather shift into a constructive and specific discussion instead. In that spirit, I'll elaborate on my criticism. Let's start with your leading sentence:
> Nope, shame is ineffective as a tool for change.
There are lots of ways to improve this sentence; here is one suggestion: consider a phrasing like "In comparison to _X_, shame tends to be less effective for _particular purpose_."
I'd suggest avoiding empirical claims about likelihoods you aren't able to defend. Take this sentence fragment:
> More often people shut down or ignore you if you attempt to shame them...
If done forcefully, this _might_ lead to "shutting down" or "ignoring"; however, on what basis can one say this happens "more often"? More often than what? The writing here overreaches -- this is why I called it "overconfident".
There are many situations where one person points out a shameful behavior in another, who recognizes it, feels bad, and i.e. apologizes and modifies their behavior. My point: it would be faulty to dismiss the idea of shame as useless in social contexts.
Finally, the next sentence also struck me as an overreach:
> As a tool for oppression however, yes it's quite effective.
Care to elaborate your thinking on that one? What do you mean by oppression?
By oppression I think of a power dynamic where the weak are kept in a lower position by the more powerful. Is this what you mean? Why do you think shaming is particularly effective way to oppress? In my mind, military, physical, legal, and economic mechanisms tend to be more effective, historically speaking.
I could speculate. Perhaps you are referring to the practice by certain religious systems to make people feel ashamed for merely doing things that all humans do (make mistakes) and thus deserve punishment (e.g. by the religious elites, or worse, by yourself, thus making yourself feel weak and unworthy).
In short, I'm sufficiently enough in these ideas to be rather unsatisfied with writing that doesn't unpack the ideas at all. No offense intended. I look forward to learning what you mean.
If you were trying to show some of the worst faith engagement possible on HN, you did it.
> Running to the press never helps.
Except of course, in reality we know that it ABSOLUTELY DOES. In fact, it has been often times the ONLY thing that has helped.
But that's different than shaming. That's over-saturating the system with false positives. To combat this I'd encourage you to not respond, in __any__ way to bullshit fake controversy and to also give positive reinforcement for when companies do something good.
I'll give an example, you've probably seen companies like Meta occasionally do something good. For example, they released the source of LLaMA. But people tend to use those opportunities to not congratulate Meta for doing the good thing but rather complain about other bad things they do. Then yes, it fits your model, because you've reached bad steady state and you can no longer turn good because nothing you do that is good will get any signal to continue in that direction.
Us humans are weird and routinely shoot ourselves in the foot only to ask who fired the bullet, smoking gun in hand.