Reflections on shame

Alex Korb: Shame and guilt are social emotions that we feel bad because we think that other people would think badly of us. They are sort of a way of preventing ourselves from doing bad things, they are also a way of punishing ourselves for having done bad things.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Alex Korb from UCLA. More from him later about the brain in shame.

Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today, how the social emotion of shame plays out in today's society, both at a personal and public level.

Social media grabs:

Speaker: Shame on you, you have given all women a bad name. You're just a piece of shit.

Speaker: An ancient, almost barbaric punishment has returned out there in the vast crowded emptiness of the virtual world. The punishment is shame. Nowadays it arrives unannounced, and when it does you will find out what it means to be alone and vulnerable.

Speaker: A disgraced pop science writer called Jonah Lehrer, he'd been caught plagiarising and faking quotes, and he was drenched in shame and regret, he told me. And he had the opportunity to publicly apologise at a foundation lunch. Maybe it would win him some salvation. He knew before he arrived that the foundation was going to be live-streaming his event, but what he didn't know until he turned up was that they had erected a giant screen Twitter feed right next to his head. And here were some of the tweets that were cascading into his eyeline as he was trying to apologise: 'Jonah Lehrer, boring us into forgiving him.' And, 'Jonah Lehrer has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.' And, 'Jonah Lehrer is just a frigging sociopath.'

That last word, it's a very human thing to do, to dehumanise the people we hurt. It’s because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it.

Jonathan Holmes: And last tonight a case of what seems to us to be serial plagiarism. You're almost certainly familiar with Dr Tanveer Ahmed. In a recent column about narcissism, Dr Ahmed wrote of: 'the timeless human desire for attention and admiration'. But actually most of that phrase and indeed almost a quarter of that column was lifted from a five-year-old article in the New Atlantis. Even more came from a four-year-old article in the New York Times. I'm afraid it doesn't look to us as though these examples are uncharacteristic.

Lynne Malcolm: Jonathan Holmes on ABC TV's Media Watch in 2012, when it was first discovered that Bangladeshi-born Australian psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed was found to have committed plagiarism in his writings for the Sydney Morning Herald. Three years later, whilst writing for The Australian newspaper, further incidents of plagiarism were revealed, which led to his sacking.

Well, since then, having been shamed publicly for his misdemeanours, Tanveer Ahmed has thought more about this emotion, and has just released a new book called In Defence of Shame.

Tanveer Ahmed: Coming from a Muslim Bangladeshi background, and I guess a lot of ethnic groups, we are effectively a shame based culture, and I think when I was growing up I looked at this notion of shame which in my language is called lajja, and there's actually a famous book with that title by a physician Taslima Nasrin, and she wrote it in the '90s. And I remember even that word…she became very infamous because there was a fatwa placed upon her by Islamic clerics and she had to flee. And I actually visited Bangladesh around then, so I became very interested in the term and it was a term I'd heard all my life. And I used to see it very negatively, it was really associated with things like honour killing, gossip, intense conformity, ostracism, and I saw it as almost a prison, and I couldn't see any positives of it.

Lynne Malcolm: You talked about your background. Perhaps explain some of your early personal memories of being shamed, just to illustrate that emotion.

Tanveer Ahmed: As humans we have something called self-conscious emotions, and the typical ones are guilt, shame is another one, humiliation is another one, embarrassment is another one, and they all need a degree of self-consciousness, we have to be aware of other people, that we are being perceived by other people. And they also require what's known as a cognitive capacity. We need to have a rational basis, we need to be able to think and have a degree of self-awareness.

And different cultures become aware of shame at different ages. I was aware of it early on but probably from punishment, so physical punishment was quite common. I remember something…what feels humorous now, a typical shaming punishment for me was I used to have to hold my ears and do multiple squats when I did something that might have warranted punishment. And I remember that distinctly, and it came back to me quite recently while I was finishing up this book because I saw it on some BBC news coverage and there was coverage in Delhi where the policemen were grabbing people who weren't socially distancing and they were lining them up to perform these squats, and I found it very humorous and it certainly reminded me of my own childhood. But that's an example of a shaming type punishment.

What shame is about is, one, it's about an audience, transgressing some sort of boundary, but a sense of a group, and that varies from guilt. Guilt doesn't necessarily have a sense of a group, it's more about having an internal set of values, and it's almost a private emotion.

The other aspect of shame, it's what psychologists call global attribution, and by that I mean when we have a specific task, let's say we are not very good at fractions and doing maths, so a specific attribution is, okay, I need to practice fractions more, maybe I'm not good at this aspect of maths, where a global attribution may go, well, you're just not very intelligent, you're just not very smart. So that's a global attribution.

So an aspect of shame is there is an association with a more global attribution related to the self, and that's a key difference between shame and guilt, this notion of an audience and a global attribution.

Lynne Malcolm: Tanveer Ahmed reflects on his own experience of being publicly shamed several years ago for plagiarism.

Tanveer Ahmed: Yes, so initially I had a side activity writing while I was a psychiatrist at the same time, and I basically had journalistic failures where I was accused of plagiarism. And essentially, look, I did essentially not attribute aspects of my column in the Sydney Morning Herald. And, to be frank, I certainly knew it was wrong but I don't think I took it terribly seriously. And it was a time when the internet was blowing up, and I definitely made those errors.

Lynne Malcolm: What sort of emotion did you feel then, what was the shame like for you then?

Tanveer Ahmed: To be frank, I probably felt more of an embarrassment because it didn't feel like it was some sort of grand strategy, it was almost like I was exposed and I felt a bit stupid and I thought, oh, okay. But I think I was lucky then too. One, I had a thoroughly solid job as a psychiatrist, which was unaffected. But also I think I felt a lot of support then, I did feel like a lot of people came out and supported me, they're like, look, just don't do it again.

And this is why when it happened to me again, and that really was a clumsy error and I'd argue it was certainly little intention that second time and I think it was more a marker of past bad habits, and it was also a bit of an attack. So it was also people who didn't like a view of mine who then hunted down looking for errors, and unfortunately I offered them rather easily. To be honest, that's when I really felt shame, even though when the error was probably more minor, that's when I really felt like I let lots of people down, and lots of supporters, people giving you another go, and as you know, Lynne, media is a tough game, opportunities are scarce, so when people put themselves on the line and had given me more opportunities and you really feel like a real sense of failure letting people down.

And there is obviously that public component, and those sort of errors are magnified in the public lens. Not only are they magnified, there's a new aspect of modern shame which is what I call the digital mark or the digital shadow, and that has overlaps with marks that may have been left in shame, say, in mediaeval times, there might've been a mark on the body or some sort of clothing. And I think that has affected me, again, probably much less seriously than some other people. But I think that is a new aspect of shame that I certainly have personal experience with.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Tanveer Ahmed, author of In Defence of Shame.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm.

Shame is a social emotion which plays out both in the public and the personal realm. So what is happening in the brain when one feels shame?

Dr Alex Korb, neuroscientist from UCLA:

Alex Korb: Part of the social emotions involve the medial prefrontal cortex which is the part of the brain that is responsible for understanding other people's perspectives and minds. If I do something that I don't think you're going to have a problem with, then I'm not going to feel guilty or ashamed, whereas if I do something that I know that you're going to be upset with but I want to do it anyway, it's my ability to understand what you are going to think of my actions that sort of dictates whether I'm going to feel guilty or ashamed about that.

And so humans have a remarkable capacity to mind-read and be able to understand, predict the thoughts of everyone around them and people that we interact with. It's just that a lot of times we are so good at it that we think we are perfect at it. And so when guilt and shame become a problem is when we do something that we think everyone is going to be so mad and upset with us if they knew, we don't want them to know, but in actuality maybe that's wrong, maybe that's just our assumption about how everyone else would think about us, but if they actually knew, they wouldn't really care that much, or they would be compassionate towards us.

One of the most interesting elements I think about guilt and shame, came from this study that I looked at where they stuck people in an fMRI machine which looks at their brain activity while people do a variety of tasks, and in this case the task they had them do was think about events that had happened or actions they had taken that they felt guilty or ashamed, and they compared that with neutral events or actions that they had taken that you felt proud of. And they found, not surprisingly, that pride, things that you are proud of, activated the reward centres of the brain.

But when they looked at guilt and shame, that also activated the reward centres in the brain. And that really surprised me, but the more I thought about it the more it started to make sense because the hardest thing for the brain to accept and really the emotional circuits in the brain to accept, is lack of control, that sometimes bad things happen for no reason.

So if you take an action and something bad happens as a consequence, it is very unsettling to think that, 'oh, that would have happened anyway' or 'that was just an accident', I couldn't have done anything about it, and that's very unsettling. And it feels calming almost to blame yourself. 'No, that was my fault', because it's a way of asserting control over an uncontrollable world.

Like if you got in a car accident and injured someone, you might feel this wave of shame, but if you thought about what else would you have done differently, if I just hadn't turned the radio at that time, and you could just feel this intense guilt and shame for these little tiny things, but it is unhelpful sometimes because we blame ourselves over and over again in order to get a sense of control over the world, but that can get us stuck. If you can learn to move past that and not fall into that addictive pattern and learn to accept that sometimes bad things happen and you don't have control over it, then it can help you move forward.

Lynne Malcolm: So you're suggesting that you can become addicted to feeling guilty or to feeling shame because of the reward system. So how difficult is it to kick that addiction?

Alex Korb: Well, it sort of depends on the type of brain that you have, because some people's brains are more emotional and they are more emotionally reactive. And it depends on how your social circuits have developed and your levels of self-criticism and your levels of criticism of other people, and what the people around you are like. Because if you are a very forgiving and compassionate person towards yourself and towards others, then it's usually easier to overcome feelings of guilt and shame because you tend to assume that other people will be forgiving of me and I'm forgiving of myself and then we can sort of move past that.

If you are very self-critical and critical of others as well and you expect perfection, then it can be very hard to break out of and move past because you're, like, I expect this of myself and I let myself down and other people should expect this and I'm not going to suddenly just go easy on myself because then I'll start making mistakes all the time. And in that way it can be very hard to break out of, and that's why one of the most important skills for people to practice is self-compassion. It can increase negative feeling sometimes when we treat ourselves more compassionately, but it helps us over time to break out of that sort of shame/guilt spiral.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Alex Korb, author, coach and neuroscientist from UCLA. And to learn more about the brain you can subscribe to Dr Korb's newsletter. We'll link to it on the All in the Mind website.

Australian psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed sees that the emotion of shame is more relevant today than ever, in relation to psychiatric disorders and other areas of mental illness.

Tanveer Ahmed: One way of thinking about shame, Lynne, is it's often related to social subordination. So I think it's a host of disorders where it is often about social avoidance and feelings of social subordination. And an argument I'm making is I think it's relatively unique in the modern era, partly because we live in a media-rich, social media knitted-together meritocracy.

And one of the disorders I talk about, social anxiety, I think we have arguably higher levels of that and we've ever had before because in a service economy there is much more focus on self-presentation, there's much more need to interact with other human beings, kind of sell yourself, if you like. But also I think social media often heightens comparison, and much has been said about that.

So historically shame has often been about a failure to do one's duty. An argument I am making is in a modern, media-rich meritocracy, shame is often about feeling unlovable or not having adequately achieved, at least in your mind, there's a moral dimension in that that takes place when we live in a meritocracy . So I think social anxiety is a modern form of shame where people become very avoidant and very fearful of negative scrutiny and feel like they need to subordinate socially, and they do so via avoidance, and I think that's an epidemic in our society.

Another arena that I talk about is self-harm. I think underneath self-harm when you examine people with self-harm…and there has been a huge rise in self-harm over the last two decades, and part of that may be measurement and it's certainly more common in women and amongst adolescents. But when you examine people self-harming, Lynne, what is often going on is an intolerability of negative emotions, there's this feeling that they just can't tolerate anger, aggression, and it's essentially internalised onto the self, and that's often what self-harm is about.

There is no question…many of them have traumatic backgrounds or conflicted households, so there's no question there is a developmental component, but there is often a strong element of shame. And this is where I also argue that in a culture that elevates positivity so much, there may also be something in the culture that contributes to our higher rates of self-harm.

Finally, I'd also add post-traumatic stress disorder. I think there's often huge amounts of shame there where people have suffered some sort of major trauma, they can't always make sense of it, partly because we increasingly lack a language to deal with those kinds of extreme adversity, of suffering. So when you have an entirely medical language to deal with catastrophe, sometimes it's not adequate. And then they become very avoidant, they can't face the world, they can't emotionally connect, and underneath of that is that element of social subordination which is very closely linked to shame.

And, to be honest, I'd actually almost say this in the last 6 to 12 months, Lynne, as I've been writing this book, and I've actually been challenging people to think about this terminology, and I found it very powerful. So in some ways I've found the book myself therapeutic, so there is obviously that personal dimension both in my professional work, both as a journalist but also as a psychiatrist, where I found it extremely powerful with my own patients.

Lynne Malcolm: Shame seems to have a very big regulating type effect on society at the moment. Can you talk a bit about in what particular areas we are really seeing shame being used as a way of perhaps regulating society?

Tanveer Ahmed: So, shame is very important in probably three different areas we use it. One is group behaviour, regulating groups, and that could be professional groups, it could be social groups. Another is regulating what we might consider primitive emotions, could be aggression, anger, disgust, and that will have a cultural component. For example, table manners, that is a typical thing that might happen in Western societies, where much of the world won't regulate table manners as intensely.

Another aspect that happens at an individual level where we set certain standards and boundaries on ourselves, and when we don't reach them we might feel shame then, particularly if we see the mistakes, again, in terms of global attribution.

I think what we are seeing at the moment, we are going through a period in history where group morality is up for grabs. Not only do we live in very diverse societies in places like Australia, particularly major cities, where you've got all manner of groups, cultural groups, professional groups, generational groups, and you've also had the decline of the traditional regulators of morality, be it religion, be it nationalism, even communities and families, in a much more anonymous urban living that most of us are in. So arguably we are at a time in history where morality and value systems are up for grabs. So you're getting these aspects of shaming particularly in social media, and social media can magnify shaming, can scale shaming like never before.

Lynne Malcolm: Can you give me an example of that?

Tanveer Ahmed: At the moment it's happening very much on political correctness grounds often where people say something that might be deemed errant regarding, say, race, gender or other views on the political platform. And I guess one aspect of my book is trying to think about what is healthy forms of shaming. And I think one think that's coming out at the moment, we are seeing an aspect of shame that is not so healthy. If we think about healthy shame, I think healthy shame depends on having an automatic component of reintegration where there may be an element of stigma, a brief period of stigma, but even as part of the shaming, there is almost an automatic attempt at reintegrating people into whatever group that they might be being shamed against. But at the moment what we are really seeing is shame with retribution, but then a lesser of an outlet, no real attempts at reintegrating, and arguably in modern terms a kind of a tougher realm to reintegrate, again with a combination of the internet and social media and activism there, arguably it's getting harder and harder to reintegrate.

Lynne Malcolm: So what's an illustration of that that's happening at the moment that you are referring to, what's a particular illustration of that?

Tanveer Ahmed: The great example is Black Lives Matter. You have examples where a football player at the LA Galaxy lost his job because his wife sent a tweet around Black Lives Matter where she said 'Black Nikes Matter', and it was related to the looting that happened. But that's an example of the measures being used to shame are getting looser and looser, not even being applied to the individual, you can be just loosely attached. I mean, he may well find another job, he is obviously a high-level player, and lesser people with lesser talent may have a similar experience and then find it extremely hard. So you're getting these disproportionate punishments I think that a combination of shaming and social media is allowing for.

Lynne Malcolm: And Tanveer suggests that shaming can be an effective tool to prompt societal change in areas where there are no current legal restrictions.

Tanveer Ahmed: So, shame is often used when there is some decision by a certain group that someone has crossed the boundary somewhere, but there may not be a traditional legal recourse. And I think sometimes that is quite useful, and I'll give you some examples where it can be useful, particularly in the corporate sphere. If you think of, say, factories or fashion factories outsourcing their manufacturing to places like Indonesia, Bangladesh which is my ancestry, shaming there regarding wages and condition were very powerful, and it was an example where what they were doing was perfectly legal within the global system, but the public shaming helped them come down to some higher standard more conducive to what the consumers in the West wanted. I mean, that's not always going to be appropriate.

A more recent example I'd say, Lynne, I think the Hayne Royal Commission was actually an example of a gentle, useful form of shaming for the financial sector, where the financial sector had arguably set their own set of values, had a shared morality or a shared set of values that was getting increasingly distant from the wider community. And those shared set of values was almost entirely about dollars. If you are able to make dollars, even if it was unethical, that was deemed okay almost to some extent. And Hayne was an example of where there was this period of stigma, but now essentially that whole system has been reintegrated and deemed very essential, and arguably they are behaving better on many grounds, given banks are giving a lot of reprieve regarding interest rates et cetera. So that may be an example of where corporations and boards can't really feel shame, individuals need to feel shame. It's also an area where fines haven't really worked. It's a good example where useful shame is a short period of stigma, and then reintegration and ideally an improvement in behaviour.

Lynne Malcolm: The title of your book is In Defence of Shame. How do you suggest that we start seeing shame as a positive thing and using it as a positive thing in society, how can we save ourselves from going down this destructive path with shame?

Tanveer Ahmed: Yes, I think people need to be aware…any time there is an element of shaming, be it at a public level or even at an individual level, I think there immediately needs to be a feeling that, okay, I need to incorporate some path to reintegration as part of any shaming. By that I mean, for example, let's take crime. So there's various strengths of…say we get a kid who has shoplifted and they have to wear an orange shirt out the front of a newsagent where they shoplifted. That's a brief period of stigma, and straightaway you would then…there was a plan to get them straight back into school or whatever they were doing, some sort of rehabilitation, get them back on the path to a more ordinary life.

And to be honest, as a doctor, that's exactly what happens. Say I did something especially heinous as a psychiatrist, say I had a relationship with another patient. Now, I would have punishment, I might be deregistered. But even as part of the deregistration, there would be an automatic path to me returning. Like you would say, okay, in the next year or two you're going to do this, this, and then we will reconsider you back into the profession, a recognition that you've got skills and you've transgressed but ultimately you're still part of this professional group and we want you back. That's an example of a ritual of reintegration.

Look, the other aspect I'd say about shame, I think a big factor in mental health at the moment, Lynne, is we are just getting a limited language in how we speak about human experience, and arguably my profession is to blame, we've been very successful at reducing stigma and I'm thrilled about that, and the fact that I can have such a prestigious and in-demand job where you can really impact lives is a tribute to that.

But I often do find that people increasingly have a very limited language to describe their experience, and it's often me trying to get people to speak in a less medical language, it's often trying to shift people from just describing their experience by saying 'I'm depressed' or 'I'm anxious' when often there's a big moral dimension or there's a metaphysical dimension. And people increasingly lack even the words for this, particularly younger people. And this has actually been borne out in studies too where they look at younger people, give them moral problems, and increasingly they find they barely have a language to even grapple with them. So I think that's a big factor in mental health disorders at the moment, Lynne, and shame is a big part of that. So often there's big components of shame but we don't necessarily even consider that a prospect, and even if we do, it's important that we name it, examine it, and that's when people can overcome it.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Tanveer Ahmed is a psychiatrist based in Sydney, he's a columnist for the Financial Review newspaper and his most recent book is called In Defence of Shame.

Thanks to All in the Mind's producer Diane Dean and today's sound engineer, Marty Peralta.

I'm Lynne Malcolm. It's great to have your company, till next time.