Shame is a survival mechanism

Shame is such a powerful and uncomfortable emotion that people might find it hard to believe that it’s actually good for something. But, 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. “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, the more weight they will put on your welfare in making decisions.”

While such a system of checks might not seem quite as dramatically vital in a modern world centuries, 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 programme — shame — that today makes you care about how much others value you, and motivates you to avoid things that would trigger negative reevaluations of you by others.”