Expressions of shame tell other people how (not) to behave

We all know that shame feels bad. There's an evolutionary reason for this. Breaking the rules of your social group puts you at risk of exclusion — so feeling bad for breaking those rules encourages you not to do so again. Now a new paper in Psychological Science reports that when we see someone else looking ashamed, this influences our behaviour, too. It seems, then, that shame doesn't just affect the person who's feeling it, but other people in the group as well.

Rebecca L. Schaumberg and Samuel E. Skowronek at the University of Pennsylvania ran a series of studies on a total of 3,726 adults who lived in the US. In an initial study, participants read about something that an employee had purportedly done at work, such as getting help from a colleague to write a report. Then they viewed a photo of that person (in fact, an actor) expressing either anger or shame, or holding a neutral expression. When the participants were asked how common and acceptable they thought this behaviour was at this company, and whether they'd do it themselves if they worked there, the shame expression was associated with the lowest ratings. This study suggests that expressions of shame carry signals about social norms, which then influence behaviour.

In a further study, also involving workplace behaviour, the team found that a shame expression acted as a stronger signal of workplace norms than expressions of anxiety or sadness.

Next, the team turned to tests of actual behaviour. In one study, participants were required to come up with rhyming words, and were told that the top performer in their group would get a small cash bonus. They were all told that they could choose to use a "rhyme booster", which would help them. Before they made that choice, though, they watched what they thought was a video of an earlier participant competing the same challenge. Participants who saw that person looking ashamed (rather than neutral) after using the rhyme booster were less likely to choose to use it themselves. It is worth noting, though, that the difference was small: 48% of those who saw the neutral expression opted to use the booster vs 37% of those in the shame condition. Still, this study did suggest that witnessing shame in others influences actual behaviour even when there is a financial cost.

Taking the results from these and further studies into account, the researchers write: "These findings show that shame broadcasts strong signals of normatively appropriate behaviour, providing the first evidence of how one person's shame affects the normative behaviour of others." They argue that the work shows that we learn from other people's expressions of shame about a group's rules, and how to behave in that group to fit in.

However, it is worth noting that participants didn't always correctly interpret the actor's 'shame' expression as shame. In one study, for instance, a substantial minority thought it was sadness (although an analysis using only those who identified the expression correctly got the same result). Clearly, more work is needed to tease apart the impacts of different negative emotional expressions. Another obvious limitation is that all the participants were based in the US, so findings in other cultures may be different.

Still, the research does suggest that shame has impacts on other people's behaviour. And the researchers also pose some interesting questions about how changing ideas of what is shameful could alter social norms. "For instance, if people stop conveying shame in response to violating a social norm, does this diminish the strength of the social norm? Conversely, if people start expressing shame in response to what was previously considered an innocuous behaviour, does this create a new norm?" Shame may have a broader, more powerful role in shaping group behaviour than we tend to think.