According to a new study, feelings of
embarrassment and humiliation are in effect a kind of evolutionary survival mechanism.
An
international team of researchers says that shame performs a vital role in
maintaining our ties to the social fabric, much like other defence mechanisms
that prohibit us from doing ourselves physical harm.
"The function of pain is to
prevent us from damaging our own tissue," said
evolutionary psychologist Daniel Sznycer from the University of California,
Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara). "The function of shame is to prevent us
from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them."
According
to the researchers, the power of shame to coerce us into behaving in certain
‘acceptable’ ways goes back to ancient human groupings when our inclusion in
social life was crucial to our ongoing survival.
"Our
ancestors lived in small, cooperative social groups that lived by hunting and
gathering. In this world, your life depended on others valuing you enough to
give you and your children food, protection, and care, " said one of
the team, anthropologist John Tooby, also of UC Santa Barbara.
"The
more you are valued by the individuals with whom you live – as a cooperative
partner, potential mate, skilled hunter, formidable ally, trustworthy friend,
helpful relative, dangerous enemy – the more weight they will put on your
welfare in making decisions. You will be helped more and harmed less."
While
such a system of checks and balances might not seem quite as dramatically vital
in a modern world centuries removed from hunters and gatherers, shame in fact
functions in pretty much the exact same way today. The researchers describe the
process as a kind of internal map we each keep of which acts would trigger a
devaluation of our reputation in the eyes of others. Keeping up appearances, in
other words.
"What
is key," said
Sznycer, "is that life in our ancestors’ world selected for a
neural program – shame – that today makes you care about how much others value
you, and motivates you to avoid or conceal things that would trigger negative
reevaluations of you by others."
To
measure how shame operates in a contemporary and cross-cultural context, the
researchers conducted an experiment with around 900 participants across the US,
India, and Israel. Participants were asked how they would feel in relation to a
number of fictional scenarios involving behaviours that – from a longstanding,
evolutionary perspective – could lead to devaluation. Such behaviours included
stinginess, infidelity, and physical weakness, among others.
Participants
in one group were asked how negatively they would view an individual if they
exhibited one of these traits. Meanwhile, participants in another group rated
how much shame they would personally feel if they exhibited the same behaviour.
The
similarity between the objective and subjective results, reported inProceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, suggest people’s inherent sense
of shame and what others would deem as unacceptable is a finely tuned emotional
reaction.
"We
observed a surprisingly close match between the negative reactions to people
who commit each of these acts – that is, the magnitudes of devaluation – and
the intensities of shame felt by individuals imagining that they would commit
those acts," said
Cosmides.
While
it’s the reaction of our local social groups that matters most to the
individual, the researchers say that some of the traits they tested for –
stinginess, lack of ambition, and infidelity – actually create strong ‘universal’
reactions that are not culturally specific, meaning the results across three
countries pretty much matched up.
"The
sheer magnitude of the shame match to foreign audiences is stunning,"said
Cosmides. "However, we think that shame is tuned specifically
to local audiences: those whose support you need."
In other
words, just because you’re on holiday in another country doesn’t mean you get
any kind of pass on bad behaviour. When it comes to the fundamentals, shame
knows no boundaries.
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