The Information Threat Theory: Why do we feel ashamed?

Shame is a very human emotion. We have all felt ashamed at times, both by things we have done and by things that others have done that make us blush. However, it also happens that we feel ashamed for things that we have not done, but that people believe that we have. Why?

At first we might think that this makes no sense, that there is no reason to feel ashamed for something that we know we have not done and, therefore, we know that we have not acted wrong. However, even so, we can't help but feel this emotion.

Information threat theory is an approach that has shed new light on the idea of ​​human shame. Let's find out why ...

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What is Information Threat Theory?

Shame is a human emotional state. Everyone, at some point in their life, has felt this experience, whether caused by something they have done or said or by something that others have done and that, by being witnesses of it, causes us some kind of discomfort. It is an emotional state that can arise from many causes, but most of them tend to coincide in being something that we regret having said or done.

One of the best known and classic explanations of why we feel ashamed comes from attributional theories, which suggest that this emotion arises when two conditions are met.

The first is living or feeling that an event or result has occurred that is inconsistent with the representations we have of ourselves, of our ideal self. For example, we feel ashamed when, wishing to be one of the best students in our class, we happen to fail an exam. Here it has happened that our ideal self has not only not been reached, but we have also moved away from that idealized image that we want to become. We feel ashamed for not getting what we want to be.

The second condition in which shame would appear would be when one attributes that event or result as something unstable of their global or real self, a trait that he considers negative and that he considers implausible to change. For example, we would feel ashamed of ourselves when we fail an exam and consider that it really is because we are not very intelligent or we are not good for studies.

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Why do we sometimes feel ashamed?

Based on these two conditions advocated by the attributional models, shame would arise as a result of feeling that one has failed to their own standards or aspirations.

There is discussion about what is shame and what is guilt. Popularly, it is agreed to consider shame as a public emotion, arisen by interacting with others, while guilt would be experienced in a more private way. Attributional theories reject this idea, considering that it does not have to be that way, and it may feel both an emotion regardless of whether or not other people know what we feel ashamed of or fault.

However, attributional theories do provide explanations of what causes shame and what causes guilt. Shame would be activated through attributions of negative events related to the global self and elements of our self considered as stable, this is traits of our personality or way of being that we perceive as negative and undesirable and we believe that they are difficult to change. Instead, guilt would be triggered by unstable negative event attributions, momentary aspects of ourselves that we believe we can change.

For example, if we fail an exam, we would feel ashamed to think that it is because we are not sufficiently intelligent (stable trait), while we would feel guilty thinking that it is because we have not studied enough (trait unstable).

The point is that when we feel ashamed, according to attributional theories, we see our global self as flawed. We feel emotional pain when we feel that we have not managed to fulfill our ideal self, which is why it is said that shame is a strongly unpleasant and aversive emotion. For this reason, this emotion is also associated with the activation of various defense mechanisms such as blaming others, feeling anger, attacking objects and people, while also experiencing problems such as anxiety, depression and ideations suicidal.

But despite having been so widely used attributional theories when explaining shame, they are not able to explain why it appears this emotion in situations where the individual who feels it consciously knows that he has not done wrong or committed a morally questionable act any. That is, attributional models seem unable to explain why innocent people, who have no reason to feel bad, they may feel ashamed for a behavior that others think they have done but that he or she knows is not So.

It is here where the information threat theory would come into play, an interesting paradigm that sheds light on this question. According to Theresa E. Robertson and his research team, authors of the article "The true trigger of shame: social devaluation is sufficient, wrongdoing is unnecessary", shame acquires a function of fascinating social survival, an emotion that can appear even without our being guilty of anything because it is designed more towards the one who will say no towards our regrets no actions.

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The information threat

According to the authors of the paper, shame is an emotion that constitutes a cognitive system shaped by natural selection, whose objective is to limit the probability and associated costs of being socially devalued due to the expansion of negative information about our person, regardless of whether it is true or false. That they say bad things about us is threatening information insofar as it risks losing status, benefits and social attention within our group or social environment.

People who are little valued among their peers are less likely to be properly cared for when they need it. A person whose social group of reference looks down on him or considers him to have a bad reputation runs the risk of not receiving help when he needs it and, even, being ignored or marginalized outright. You are also more prone to being a victim of exploitation if people believe something bad about you, and you suspect that, in Prehistoric times, being socially devalued by the herd was a hard handicap for the survival of the individual.

According to the information threat theory of shame, this emotion is activated in the mind of the individual when he notices that the others People have noticed (or you get the feeling that they realize) that they know negative information about him, whether it is true information or not. According to this hypothesis, this emotion would have an evolutionary functionality, the adaptive purpose to ensure that the individual does not remain arms crossed to see that his reputation is tainted but that he does not continue to commit acts that put his social and individual survival at risk.

Three would be the functionalities of shame according to this paradigm.

The first is that the shame would appear so that the person behaves in a particularly careful way once they have become aware of the threatening information that is being said about them. The individual must take care of what he does or says, lest it make the situation worse than it already is. The objective is to avoid being socially more devalued than they are at the moment and, thus, to avoid entering an even more precarious social situation.

The second would be that, in order to prevent his reputation from getting even worse because more people know the negative information about him, the individual would try to limit the expansion and disclosure of the above information. This information is a key point in the theory, since it poses in itself the threat of the information that gives its name to the paradigm, opinions, comments, thoughts or data that, regardless of how true or false they are, are potentially harmful.

Finally, and to try to regain the status prior to the threat, the individual tries to limit and mitigate the costs of any consequent social devaluation. He may not quite succeed, but his goal is to try to neutralize the negative information that has been shared about him and to anticipate in case he knows that he can reach other people, in order to give them a version or a rebuttal of what is being said about him or she.

Thus, the information threat theory holds that it is not that we are ashamed of regret something we have said or done, especially if we have not really done any. Any innocent person can feel ashamed simply knowing or suspecting that others people see them in a negative way, regardless of whether or not it corresponds to how they are or what they have done in reality. Shame would be the result of negative beliefs and thoughts of others towards us, that make us uncomfortable and make us fear for our social integrity.

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The devaluation problem

In smaller societies, based on subsistence economies and social systems with few members, the potential consequences of not being socially valued are very negative.

In these societies, if one of the members is socially undervalued, they hardly have social benefits, something that becomes a big problem if you find yourself in a situation where you need help, such as falling ill or being the victim of an accident. He has little chance of the rest of the group coming to his aid, and therefore a better chance of not surviving.

Due to the evolutionary benefits of being highly valued and the risk to our survival that it is not, natural selection has provided the human mind with a series of mechanisms that ensure that, when necessary, we behave in a way that improves our social image, motivate us to make others value us and look for people who have a higher social status than ours.

In addition to this, we have cognitive skills to identify and try to achieve skills perceived in the group as socially desirable, such as being in good physical shape, having a job, participating in a volunteer service or being the one who fishes the best in the river next to the village. Whatever society we live in, in all of them there are socially well-valued skills and merits that make the people who possess them are also taken into account.

Information Threat Theory suggests that shame is also part of this evolutionary endowment and that this emotional state has arisen to solve the possible adaptive and survival problems that arise because of feeling that one is devalued.

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How does shame protect us from devaluation?

Being socially devalued implies running the risk of receiving less social benefits, in addition of incurring more costs in case of need due to not receiving the help of the the rest. This brings with it reduced prospects for survival and reproduction.

It is believed that social devaluation was a very recurrent situation in ancient times and, taking into account that at that time societies were smaller, the transmission of Negative information was a much more damaging phenomenon as it was not so easy to turn to people who were not aware of the bad reputation of the individual from whom it was reported. he spoke badly.

Due to the risk to our survival that others see us as socially undesirable, it is believed that natural selection has created the mechanisms to detect and anticipate social devaluation and, thus, limit the possibilities of its occurrence and its costs associates. These include mechanisms to minimize the leakage and spread of discrediting information, and improve the socially valued quality that has been compromised, fight to be treated better in case of injustice and tolerate some reduction in status.

Apart from the behaviors associated with these situations, the information threat theory predicts a series of cognitive, motivational, and affective responses and physiological ones focused on the objective of cushioning the devaluation and facing the severe social situation caused by the transmission of negative information.

This would make sense of the behaviors associated with shame, which the theory understands as behaviors to minimize reputational damage. We behave trying to avoid that the reputational damage goes to more; We don't talk to people who have passed on negative information until we think of a counter-information or apology or, directly, we withdraw from social situations for a while. All of them are aimed at preventing negative knowledge about us from getting worse, and consequently we feel more shame.