Does Public Shaming Change Behaviour
Letters that made a tax debt more visible got small debts paid and moved large ones not at all. The research that ties shame to better conduct measures something different, a private feeling and the way a person is treated afterwards, and publicity is not part of what it tests.
Answer to the question
Does public shaming make people behave better?
In one large field experiment, public shaming got small tax debts paid sooner, those under $2,500, and had no significant effect on larger ones. The studies linking shame to less reoffending measure guilt-proneness and felt reintegration instead. None follows publicly shamed people to see whether later conduct changed.
Key takeaways
- Perez-Truglia and a co-author (2018) wrote to 34,334 delinquent taxpayers in three US states who owed about $500 million. Greater visibility of delinquency raised payment among people owing under $2,500 and had no significant effect on larger debts.
- In the same experiment, financial reminders raised payment at every debt size, and telling recipients that neighbours were delinquent had no effect.
- Tangney and colleagues (2014) followed 476 inmates after release. Guilt-proneness predicted less reoffending in the first year; shame-proneness predicted more only through its link to blaming others.
- Murphy and a colleague (2007) surveyed 652 tax offenders. Those who felt their enforcement experience was reintegrative rather than stigmatising were less likely to report evading tax two years later.
- None of the three studies follows publicly shamed people over time to see whether their later conduct changed.
Public shaming made some people pay and left others untouched, and the research that links shame to better conduct is mostly about something else. In a field experiment on delinquent taxpayers across three US states, letters that made a person's delinquency more visible raised payment among those with small debts and had no significant effect on those with large ones. The studies of shame and reoffending measure a private feeling and the way a person is treated afterwards, not publicity. Read together, they suggest that public shaming moves small, reputation-sensitive debts, while lasting change tracks whether the person stays inside the group once the disapproval has been delivered.
Letters to 34,334 delinquent taxpayers
The cleanest test of public shaming on real behaviour comes from tax debt. The economist Ricardo Perez-Truglia and a co-author wrote to long-delinquent taxpayers in Kansas, Kentucky and Wisconsin who together owed about $500 million. They varied at random how visible the recipient's delinquency would be to other people, how prominent the financial penalties were, and whether the letter compared the recipient with neighbours.
Greater visibility increased payment among people who owed less than $2,500. For larger debts it had no significant effect. Plain financial reminders raised payment whatever the size of the debt, and telling recipients that their neighbours were also delinquent changed nothing.
The outcome was payment, a single act that takes a name off a list. It says nothing about whether anyone behaved differently the following year, and the recipients were already in collection, where paying is the only behaviour on offer. The pattern is also what a plain money account predicts, so the experiment does not separate shame from the price of being listed. The authors caution that shaming could alienate people, which is why they suggest other tactics may be worth weighing alongside it.
The authors began from the worry that shaming penalties may fail, or even reduce compliance, by crowding out intrinsic motivation: a penalty that makes people feel watched can replace the reasons they already had for paying. Their result fits a narrower claim. Below $2,500, a name on a delinquency list costs more than the money owed, and the letters worked on that margin. Above it, a reminder about interest and penalties did the work and visibility added nothing detectable.
Shame and guilt do different work
A second line of evidence asks what the feeling itself predicts. The psychologist June Tangney and two colleagues assessed 476 inmates soon after they were incarcerated, interviewed 332 of them a year after release and obtained official records for 446. Guilt-proneness, a tendency to feel bad about an act, directly predicted less reoffending in that first year. Participants were asked about any later offending, including offences that went undetected, and their answers were checked against official records, so the outcome does not rest on self-report alone.
Nobody in this study was subjected to public shaming. Proneness is a trait measured by questionnaire, and the inmates received no public rebuke. The finding concerns which people were likely to stay out of trouble, so it cannot be turned into advice about what a rebuke will do to someone who is not already prone to guilt.
Shame-proneness, a tendency to feel bad about the self, did not predict reoffending directly. It predicted more reoffending indirectly, through a strong link to blaming others. Where shame was not accompanied by blame-shifting, it was associated with less reoffending, and the paper's abstract says items about a motivation to hide were primarily responsible for that pattern. The authors describe shame as having a destructive and a constructive side. These figures and findings follow the abstract of the paper itself, published in Psychological Science.
Proneness to guilt predicts less recidivism.
Braithwaite's two kinds of disapproval, tested on tax offenders
The criminologist John Braithwaite of the Australian National University argued in Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge University Press, 1989) that the useful question is how disapproval is delivered. The definitions below follow his later account of the theory. In that account, reintegrative shaming condemns the deed while keeping the person within a relationship of respect, and it ends with the person being welcomed back. Stigmatising shaming labels the person as bad and leaves the label in place. His theory predicts that the first kind, and not the second, reduces offending.
The researcher Kristina Murphy and a colleague tested it in 2007 with survey data from 652 tax offenders. Offenders who felt their enforcement experience had been reintegrative rather than stigmatising were less likely to report evading tax two years later. Shame-related emotions partly accounted for the link between the two.
This is an association between how people described an experience and what they later reported. It does not show that an agency can produce the reintegrative experience by changing its procedure. Reported evasion also depends on what people are willing to say, and the offenders who felt stigmatised may have been the least willing to say it. It does show that, among these offenders, the question that separated better from worse outcomes was how they felt they had been treated, and no measure of how many people had seen the sanction was needed to make the contrast.
| Study | Who | What was measured | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perez-Truglia et al. (2018) | 34,334 delinquent taxpayers, three US states | Payment after letters varying visibility | More payment under $2,500; no significant effect above |
| Tangney et al. (2014) | 476 inmates, followed after release | Shame- and guilt-proneness against reoffending | Guilt-proneness predicted less reoffending; shame depended on blame |
| Murphy et al. (2007) | 652 tax offenders | Felt reintegration or stigma against later evasion | Reintegrative experience linked to less evasion at two years |
Where does Lembke's fork fit?
The seed for this article is chapter 9 of Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation (Dutton, 2021), which opens at p. 207. Lembke argues that shame has two edges and that the group decides which one a person gets. If the group shuns the person, the shame is destructive. If it accepts the person and asks for specific amends, she calls the shame prosocial. The fork she draws sits in the environment, not in the person.
A direct test would assign people at random to a rebuke that ends in readmission or one that ends in a label, hold the audience constant and follow conduct for a year or more. None of the studies above did that, and Lembke's chapter does not claim it has been done. Until it is, the fork between destructive and prosocial shame remains a well-formed prediction, and the reintegration findings give it a footing without confirming it.
Set beside the studies above, the proposal lines up closely with Braithwaite's distinction, and its mechanics resemble the guilt side of Tangney's findings: a named act, specific amends and a self left intact. The chapter draws on clinical experience and fellowship practice and does not cite the shame research, so it reads best as a hypothesis about how groups produce the reintegrative version of disapproval. The claim to test is the one about the group's response, and the studies here come closest in the tax offenders' reports.
What an agency can claim
An agency that relies on public shaming has evidence for one outcome: small debts paid sooner when the debtor expects to be seen. The evidence stops there. None of the three studies follows people who were publicly shamed to see whether their later conduct changed, and the exposure study measured a single payment.
Three questions separate evidence from assertion when someone proposes shaming as a policy. What outcome is counted, a single payment or conduct over time? Who is shaming, an audience the person belongs to or strangers? And what happens once the disapproval has been delivered? The tax experiment answers only the first, and only for one kind of debt. The other two studies bear on the third, and they point to the treatment that follows the rebuke, whatever the audience was.
Work that connects shame with better behaviour concerns what happens after the criticism. Guilt about an act, felt reintegration and the absence of blame-shifting were the conditions linked with fewer repeat offences, all of them associations rather than results of an assigned treatment. A programme built on exposure alone borrows credit from that literature without meeting its conditions. One built to pair a stated objection to the act with a clear route back is nearer to what the associations favour, though no trial here has compared the two. For the practice as a whole, the open matter is what follows the exposure, which is where the three papers locate later behaviour.
Common questions
Does public shaming make people behave better?
In one large field experiment it made some people pay a tax debt sooner: those who owed under $2,500. For larger debts it had no significant effect. No study discussed here shows that public shaming improves later conduct, as opposed to a single payment.
Does public shaming work on large debts?
Not in the tax experiment. Visibility had no significant effect on people who owed more, while financial reminders raised payment at every debt size. The authors suggest the reputational stakes may be too small against a large sum.
Is shame the same as guilt?
In this research they are separate. Guilt attaches to an act, shame to the self. Tangney and colleagues found guilt-proneness predicted less reoffending, while shame-proneness predicted more only when it came with blaming others.
What is reintegrative shaming?
Braithwaite's term for censure that condemns the deed, keeps the person in a relationship of respect and ends with the person welcomed back. Murphy and a colleague found that tax offenders who felt reintegrated were less likely to report evasion two years later.
Sources
Perez-Truglia, R., & Troiano, U. (2018). 'Shaming tax delinquents.' Journal of Public Economics, 167, 120-137. doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2018.09.008
Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Martinez, A. G. (2014). 'Two faces of shame: The roles of shame and guilt in predicting recidivism.' Psychological Science, 25(3), 799-805. doi:10.1177/0956797613508790
Murphy, K., & Harris, N. (2007). 'Shaming, shame and recidivism: A test of reintegrative shaming theory in the white-collar crime context.' British Journal of Criminology, 47(6), 900-917. doi:10.1093/bjc/azm037
Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge University Press.
Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Dutton, chapter 9.