Why Shaming Can't Work
Every act of shaming normalizes the activity more broadly—not just for your allies, but for everyone.
It can be tempting to shame those you disagree with, especially given that it seems to work.
You advertise your disdain for drug users, prostitutes, and sexual deviants. You slander anti-communists as selfish capitalist pigs who hate the poor. You mock your ideological foes on social media.
But shaming unto itself is never an argument—it is therefore not persuasive. It can only appear to change a person’s mind if the shaming tactic is coupled to an argument, even if only an implicit one.
Imagine publicly telling your drug-addicted sibling that he is an embarrassment to the family (effectiveness arguments aside, this is cruel, as we will see).
“I might’ve caused him to suffer, but it worked!” you retort. “After I called him out publicly, he chose to get sober.”
There are two possibilities.
One, your sibling could've been affected by an implicit argument in your shame tactic—i.e. that his current path in life contradicts his values and thwarts his pursuit of happiness. You may not have even intended to make such an argument, but your sibling could have interpreted your words as such. In that case, it was not shame that caused him to get clean, but rather an argument. To the extent that he felt shame in addition to hearing the argument, you’ve only caused unnecessary suffering—and that is cruelty.
The other possibility is that your sibling did not get clean for his own sake at all. He was not persuaded that doing so would be the right thing to do for himself. Rather, he sought sobriety to avoid further suffering caused by you. He has not learned that getting clean would help him find happiness. Rather, he has learned that getting clean would help him avoid your abuse. In this scenario, there is no reason why he would remain clean: if he found a way to do drugs whilst avoiding your public shaming, he’d do so. Getting clean was merely a means to avoid your abuse, not an attempt to resolve his addiction as an end in its own right.
So, even when shaming seems to work in the moment, it can never replace argument, persuasion, and learning.
On a societal level, every act of shaming serves to normalize shaming as a replacement for persuasion. You might find shaming my lifestyle a noble cause, but others will feel the same way about yours. Should shaming become pervasive, everyone would shame everyone else: no one is persuaded, no explicit arguments are made, and everyone suffers.
Shaming is bad strategy, too. As I said, every act of shaming normalizes the activity more broadly—not just for your allies, but for everyone. An ideological faction that you despise is bound to grow in prominence somewhere, sometime. Why give them another weapon?
This essay was originally published with the Critical Rationalism News Substack.
Thanks for sharing Logan - a thought-provoking read as I was waiting at the dentist! haha.
I think there are interesting parallels you can make to other "easy" or "socially acceptable" interventions - like competition or rallying for a particular tribe/ party - that can appear to achieve change or outcomes, but usually at the expense of anger, envy, anxiety and other destructive behaviours.
Proper reasoning and a desire for progress/ solving problems is a "healthier" means to make progress happen.