We seem to be reminded on a regular basis that there are some individuals in our world who are largely immune from a sense of shame – indeed, any sense of embarrassment. Such people must be deeply painful to spend any time with, because this immunity must be a sign that they lack empathy and any ability to see themselves through others’ eyes.
Yet while occasional senses of shame and embarrassment are intensely human, and surely a positive, an ongoing and unshakeable feeling of shame can only be negative. This is termed ‘trait shame’ in a brief and thoughtful paper on Psyche from US clinical psychologists Michaela Swee and Susan Murray. Typically arising from bad experiences in formative years, sufferers feel that they do not deserve good things, that they are ‘bad’ or ‘broken’. Swee and Murray distinguish this from feelings of guilt because it is to do with the individual’s whole sense of themselves, not simply their feelings with regard to a specific act or behaviour.
The clinicians argue that the appropriate response to such shame is not to suppress it nor to avoid the feelings that arouse it, but to recognise and acknowledge it, and to be self-compassionate. In effect, they argue that we should learn to be fair to ourselves, acknowledge the feelings, recognise their underlying origins, and yet be honest about how unfair to ourselves that ongoing sense of shame is.
After all, such fairness should surely typify our response to those who are less fortunate than ourselves and who face negative life events. Very often, individuals’ decision-making is constrained by their circumstances and allows them to achieve only limited amounts or obliges them to take risks that may not come good. David Kinney, now an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Washington University in St Louis, has long studied causation and the limits to our understanding of it given real-world complexities. In another article for Psyche, Kinney considers these issues through the case of Kenny Chow, a New York immigrant from Myanmar, who in 2011 when made redundant after 20 years working for a jewellery firm chose to buy a taxi medallion for $750,000. Though for a short while this seemed like a good decision, the advent of ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft completely changed the economics of the taxi business. Chow started to struggle to make the repayments on his loan and eventually took his own life in 2018.
Kinney tries to make the mathematical case that we should be understanding in such situations. He argues that the complexity of decision-making ensures that it will be unknowable for most individuals to predict likely future scenarios and so assess whether they are making wise decisions. Having advised clients on scenario analysis when thinking about climate risk for investment portfolios, I well know that the best way of thinking about the process is not as an attempt to predict the future but rather to seek to gain insights into the range of possible outcomes so as to try to build resilience to the worst ones. As Kinney says, wisdom might lead to individuals not putting all their eggs in a single basket, limiting individual exposures as investment institutions and the wealthy certainly do – but such a mindset assumes that all have resources sufficient to spread their risks effectively. The ability to spread risks is itself a privilege not available to all. Kinney’s is a logical case, but it lacks the compassion that Swee and Murray might argue for, and that the cruelty of the Chow case probably invites.
Even setting aside compassion, in spite of the logic of Kinney’s case, many of us tend to assume that poor life choices lead individuals into these situations. Significant numbers of people – especially in the US – believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and poverty arises from a lack of effort. As we’ve seen previously, people in the US are particularly optimistic about the chances of people from the bottom quintile of wealth rising out of that during their lives. While those from other countries are more realistic (even pessimistic), the chances of rising from poverty are in most countries depressingly small – even though we love to hear those rare rags-to-riches tales.
Ironically, it is the central importance of fairness to who we are as humans that can lead us to lack compassion, to fail to be fair to ourselves and others. Just as the centrality of fairness to our human world-view leads us to believe in meritocracy in a largely misplaced way, so our view that the world is just means that we are prone to find post-hoc justifications for unfairness having happened to others. Psychologist Melvin Lerner called this the just-world hypothesis and found it makes people enter into intellectual contortions to make injustice make sense – to the extent of asserting that randomly chosen individuals from their own groups actually in some way deserved the mistreatment they received at the hands of experimenters. This sense was strongest for those that were unable to influence the mistreatment, suggesting that disempowerment plays a role in being willing to convince ourselves that iniquitous outcomes are in some way fair. That’s dangerous given how many people increasingly feel disempowered.
As law professor Tess Wilkinson-Ryan explains in her fascinating book Fool Proof, “There are enormous psychological consequences to believing that the world is unfair – it feels really destabilizing and depressing – and people will adapt their other beliefs to fit a story about a just universe. The feeling of living in a rigged or random system can feel terrifying and unsettling in a way that is worse than losing and feeling like you deserved to lose.” Lerner’s evidence is even stronger than Wilkinson-Ryan expresses it – the adaptions of beliefs are awakened not by the world as a whole proving unfair, but just that our world contains specific unfairnesses that we often cannot influence.
Unlike Stanley Kowalski (in Streetcar Named Desire), we don’t make our own luck. We are framed in the world around us, and not all options are available to all of us. Swee and Murray argue that we need to work to awaken our compassionate selves, so as to be more fair to ourselves. I’d argue we need to awaken our compassionate selves to be more fair to others too – and not be so fooled by our firm desires for a fair world that we think that all current outcomes must be the consequence of fairness.
See also: Fairness – the human lens for addressing our current challenges
Meritocracy’s unfair
I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.
How to cope with shame, Michaela Swee, Susan Murray. Psyche, 2023
The mathematical case against blaming people for their misfortune, David Kinney. Psyche, 2021
Just World Research and the Attribution Process: Looking Back and Ahead, Melvin Lerner, Dale Miller. Psychological Bulletin 85, No 5 (1978)
Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes our Selves and the Social Order – and what we can do about it, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan. Harper Collins, 2023
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