Prosocial Shame

What it is

Lembke draws two cycles. In the destructive one, a person acts, conceals it or is shunned, becomes isolated, and acts again. In the prosocial one, the person acts, discloses honestly, is accepted by the group together with a required set of amends, belongs, and acts less. Her worked cases are mutual-aid fellowships, where a member tells the truth about a lapse to a room that will not expel them but will ask them to make it right. Chapter 9 opens at p. 207.

What makes the account distinctive is where it puts the cause. In the research on shame and guilt, the fork is attributional: guilt targets an act and shame targets the self, and where the feeling is aimed is a property of the person. Lembke's fork is environmental: one feeling, two outcomes, depending on how the group receives the disclosure.

The vault's reading of the chapter is that it draws on clinical experience and fellowship practice and does not cite the shame researchers whose work is closest to it. The only researcher named in the chapter is an economist of religion, Laurence Iannaccone, whose club-good model Lembke has herself applied to Alcoholics Anonymous. The chapter's theoretical engine is therefore economics, not the psychology of shame.

In effect

Next to reintegrative shaming

John Braithwaite's reintegrative shaming theory, published in 1989, is the closest academic analogue: disapproval of the deed that keeps the person inside a relationship of respect and ends with readmission, against disapproval that labels the person. Lembke's prosocial cycle has the same structure, a named act, specific amends and membership kept. The tax-offender survey by Kristina Murphy and Nathan Harris (2007) is one empirical test of that kind of distinction, and it found that offenders who felt reintegrated were less likely to report evading tax two years later.

Next to shame versus guilt

Lembke's prosocial cycle contains the machinery that the shame and guilt literature assigns to guilt: a specific transgression, a specific repair, and a self left intact. Read that way, her environmental fork becomes a plausible account of how a group produces the guilt attribution and not the shame one. That reading is this site's, not hers.

A functional account of shame

A second source in the vault gives shame a job instead of a moral colour. Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, in The Elephant in the Brain, define shame at p. 60 as the anguish of being seen in degrading circumstances, and treat the fear of it as what keeps people from cheating or makes them cover their tracks. On that account shame is calibrated to being seen, so what the group does when it sees you becomes the variable, which is exactly where Lembke puts the fork. The authors describe what shame is for and do not test what it does, so the two accounts fit together without either supplying evidence for the other.

A caution about the word prosocial

The label carries a risk. It can suggest that the feeling itself is the helpful ingredient, when on Lembke's own account the helpful ingredient is the group's response: acceptance together with required amends. If the amends and the acceptance are doing the work, the feeling may be incidental. The shame and guilt literature points the same way, since guilt, which attaches to an act, is the emotion with the better record in the study of reoffending. Used carefully, the term names a pattern of group response and not a kind of emotion.

What a test would look like

A direct test would assign people at random to a disclosure that ends in readmission with amends or in rejection, keep the audience constant, and follow conduct for a year or more. The studies reviewed in the article on public shaming do not do that. The finding closest to it is an association in a tax-offender survey.

What it does not say

It does not show that shame reduces consumption of anything. The chapter's evidence is patient testimony and one general claim about religious involvement, and this site makes no clinical claim about addiction or its treatment.

It does not show that the fork is environmental. The research literature that exists supports an attributional distinction between shame and guilt, and the environmental account has not been tested against it.

It does not separate adults who chose a group from people who did not. A mechanism that works in a fellowship members join voluntarily need not work where membership is imposed.

Evidence status: contested. The idea is coherent and testable, and its central claim is untested.

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