What if Shame Gets Results? Beyond "Body Shaming" & "Fat Shaming".…

what if the feeling of being ashamed
being stupid is one in the same thing as being positively motivated to try to become intelligent you feel ashamed about being bad and stupid and ignorant and wrong you feel bad about being poorly spoken unable to express your ideas in a clearer convincing way that feeling of shame may not be separable from it may not be irreplaceable or X trickable component of what we describe in other contexts as a positive motivation I've grown up in a culture where I feel I'm surrounded by people at all ages at all socio-economic levels who simply embrace dumbing out they feel no sense of shame in being stupid in being ignorant in being poorly spoken they're not afraid to appear to be an idiot at all they embrace it our attitudes create habits with the passage of time and repetition our habits shape who we really are I cannot boast that my YouTube videos are short blunt and to the point however I make videos that are blunt and to the point whether or not they're short varies a great deal with the topic at hand we're going to discuss scientific research in this video about a topic that nobody reflects on scientifically the role of shame the role of negative motivation quote negative emotionality was expected to impair learning from errors by decreasing motivation to learn jumping ahead to the sentence highlighted in green contrary to the prediction a positive association was found between negative emotionality and motivation to learn why would this be surprising whether we're discussing this issue autobiographically philosophically or scientifically why would anyone be surprised to discover that as we used to say shame is the mother of learning now let's talk about the spectrum of shame for just a moment here because some of you may be thinking of extreme examples of shame and some of you may be thinking about very trivial very small-scale examples of shame all of them have to be considered in this examination I had a video recently talking about drug addiction and I quoted several people who quit drugs and they really spoke positively about how feeling ashamed of themselves as drug addicts was crucial to their gaining the motivation to live a life of sobriety to change their lives to give up drugs so on and so forth one of them said specifically and movingly that she felt ashamed to walk across the courtroom in Chains in front of her own mother her mother who had given her everything her mother who had given her so much support and educational opportunities in life who had set her up to succeed now she was walking in front of her mother with her hands and feet in Chains she was ashamed and she got positive motivated to quit drugs I have all my life heard similar anecdotes from drug dealers very often people who were experienced drug dealers said that they didn't feel ashamed at all when they were dealing with the police face-to-face and you could imagine the kind of privado that they feel the police of their opponents their enemies they maybe don't feel ashamed when they're facing and the police are facing out the jail cell but then they have the experience of seeing the expression on their mother's face their grandmother's face their aunts and uncles faces maybe their brothers and sisters faces they see how shocked and disappointed and ashamed their own family members are when it's revealed that they have been a drug dealer that they have been arrested that they were facing these charges and very often they will reflect that this shame powerfully motivated them to start a new life junior doing this is this is not this is not uncommon this is frankly ubiquitous in human experience although we can't draw up some kind of simple rule or some sort of got some kind of simple conclusion that Shane gets results it's very clear to all of us that Shane often plays a role in motivating us to adapt to change to learn the chain can in so many ways be a good or positive thing over at the over at the sort of miniscule end of the spectrum all my life people have perceived me as being gifted at public speaking being a very skilled orator being very good at face-to-face person-to-person conversations I grew up with a tremendous and intense sense of shame whenever I happened to use the wrong word in conversation whenever I happened to stumble over my words in conversation and nobody taught me this it wasn't that I was ridiculed by other children or ridiculed by my parents it wasn't that I was given encouragement one way or another by my teachers I felt ashamed if I spoke poorly if I said the wrong thing if I misused the war of any word and I would often remember very precisely what it was I'd said wrong and what the ever was and I agonized over it and I might wake up the next morning regretting it no reason why do we presume that speaking well and feeling ashamed of speaking badly are two separate things what if they are in fact one and the same thing what if there isn't any particular desire in me to speak well what if there's just this negative motivation that I don't want to be an idiot unless I end up over years developing myself into a more intelligent person I've grown up in a culture where I feel I'm surrounded by people at all ages at all socio-economic levels who simply embrace dumbing out they feel no sense of shame in being stupid in being ignorant in being poorly spoken they're not afraid to appear to be an idiot at all they embrace it our attitudes create habits with the passage of time and repetition our habits shape who we really are people who have this kind of shameless and relaxed attitude to what they say what they read what they know and they don't know fashion themselves into shameless thoughtless foolish people and yes there might be an opposite extreme of someone who's very reluctant to speak because they're so afraid of saying the wrong thing someone is very reluctant to commit to an opinion because they're afraid of and ashamed of being wrong but that self same shame can propel you forward to do research to cultivate an informed opinion to become a well-spoken highly effective highly intelligent person so how do we come now to be in this culture that presumes that shame is an entirely negative thing that propels this doctrine that nobody should feel ashamed the fad should not be ashamed of feeling fat the lazy should not feel ashamed of being lazy the ignorant and the stupid should not be ashamed of any of their failings much less should they feel a positive motivation to make something better out of themselves how did that become the predominant cultural discourse in the 2020 and let me just ask you do you think it can last I did quite a lot of research on the history of Education when I was living in China de Hong Yin an China and I presented a series of lectures to my students I was teaching at a university at the time that related to him see there I misspoke I presented a series of lectures to them relating and contrasting the history of the development of Education in Europe to East Asia North America to England Scotland Italy various centres of education in the history of Europe and asking the question how is it that a country like the United States has become in many ways the the unquestioned model of what university education should be or even what primer and great school education should be is there is there instead a Japanese model we should look at the history of development of is there instead a British model an Italian model a French model talking about the history of loss of education in this pragmatic way and one of the questions I got interested in personally and that I involved my class in discussing it's a series of lectures the university and there were homework assignments and so on why was the history of education in Scotland so different from the history of education in England right next door or indeed any other major European power one explanation that immediately resonated with me because I myself have experience living in Scotland when I was a kid about 12 years old was just the blunt statement in one of the books I was reading on this that the Scottish had during those centuries an intense culture of shame surrounding personal ignorance and lack of reading and that more important than the particular arrangement of classes in the school system specific educational policies adopted by the government was the Scottish culture of openly revealing people for having failed to have read a book of making one another basically ridiculing one another for their ignorance which again I experienced myself whatever it is centuries later when I was living in Scotland and that connected to this was the intense Scottish culture of the book club the books of course were much more expensive in the past there today very often people couldn't own books or build up a library themselves but people would join book clubs the book clubs would give them all a copy of the book for two weeks or whatever it was and meet and discuss the book they read in a circle they did returned the book to the book club there also by the way were book clubs where one or two actors would read the book aloud while others listen to this a form of reading that's much forgotten today basically performing a book for an audience but there was this tremendous pressure in Scottish society for a man in order to be a man and be taken seriously to at all times be reading serious books the way this was written and the frank admission that this wasn't something glorious inviting or pleasant about Scottish culture but that this was in fact really something quite bitter and nasty in Scottish culture of people upgrading each other for their ignorance I could immediately relate to that and it brought back memories of Scotland and frankly just how openly cruel and vicious my own school teacher was in Scotland compared to a schoolteacher in Canada I couldn't imagine a teacher in Canada insulting and denigrating me the way that Scott look did and I think she did it to just about everybody that was also a part of their culture they had just recently abolished beating students with the strap and to mention this also it wasn't purely intellectual the shaming that went on Scotland they forced all the boys to go to Jim shirtless so again I was I think 11 and at the beginning and then later 12 when I was in Scotland so you haven't really gone through purely lad and the the gym instructor would openly shame the boys who were getting fatter or more out of shape or the boys with less muscular development of the others so this extended to fat shaming and body she been in school openly so on and so forth any kind of evaluation of the real-world outcomes of shame including the one in this scientific study has to address the history of religion north and south east and west there can be no doubt the reason why most people alive in 2020 and definitely most people on the left wing presume that shame is something completely counterproductive and negative in our lives the reason for this assumption is that the Christian religion attached shame to myriad things that are completely unproductive to be ashamed of them now this is going to get more difficult to deal with not less as the 21st century goes on if you are homosexual or if you are a lesbian you may recognize that it's completely counterproductive to feel ashamed of it you know and it may nevertheless be very difficult for you psychologically to get to grips with your own sexual identity I don't think that's easy I don't however the Christian discourse of shame that was attached to sexuality entailed absurdities of enormous scale not just making all homosexuals feel regretful about their homosexuality it made all heterosexuals feel regretful about their heterosexuality you know heterosexual men convincing themselves that it's something did based and demonic that they would ever feel attracted to a woman other than their lawfully wedded wife women feeling it's something to base the demonic they should ever desire to have sex with more than one member of the opposite sex between their their birth and their death of natural causes in old age like and people really trying to hypnotize themselves into this ideological sexual identity now Christianity is not the only religion we can fault here obviously Islam and Judaism are very much birds of a feather in this respect I think anyone who does social science research would recognize how profoundly different all of the discourse surrounding shame is when you switch to a tear about a Buddhist culture like Thailand or even a very peculiar mixed Buddhist and Shinto culture like Japan there seem to be absolutely no doubt surrounding the assumption that a criminal should face up the karmic consequences of his actions and feel ashamed that a drug addict should feel ashamed and indeed drug addicts were being dragged into Buddhist monasteries and signing up for 100% shame based programs in which the religion was actively involved in motivating them to go through withdrawal and so on and motivating them to lead a life of sobriety completely overt discourse about what it means to be a man and how ashamed of yourself you ought to be if you fail to live up to this standard basically constant mental alertness vigilance and sobriety a shame shame shame shame shame there is an interesting question for the social sciences is shame more effective than any particular possible alternative to shame I want to emphasize here there may not be an alternative ashamed philosophically we have to start by asking as I said much earlier in this video what if the feeling of being ashamed being stupid is one in the same thing as being positively motivated to try to become intelligent you feel ashamed about being bad and stupid and ignorant and wrong you feel bad about being poorly spoken unable to express your ideas in a clearer convincing way that feeling of shame may not be separable from it may not be a replaceable or ex trickable component of what we describe in other contexts as a positive motivation we may just be talking about two different ways of describing one in the same thing the most important finding of this study is however that virtually no research has ever been done in this field on this question the study includes a review of the literature that I think is much more important than its particular findings and the review of the literature says basically built into this field of study is the assumption that negative emotions are negative the things we call bad like shame have bad outcomes and couldn't possibly play a positive role in motivating learning in motivating positive personal change that assumption is profoundly false the fact that there has been almost no research in this area I think reflects a deep 21st century cultural impetus a kind of willing ignorance the fact that many of us simply don't want to know [Music]