The Shame Game

Psychologist Paul Bloom does not seem to know quite what to make of it, but he is correct to see humiliation as a profoundly important motivation. Someone who loses face, whether by being publicly humiliated, of by failing at a responsibility, will often become consumed by the duty to save face,

It’s so important that I wrote a book about it. Its title was Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame.

Bloom suggests that those who lose face will go to any lengths to save face. For example, consider the moment when, at a White House correspondents dinner, President Obama ridiculed one Donald Trump. Many people have suggested that this humiliation motivated Trump to run for president. 

Perhaps that is true. Perhaps it is slightly exaggerated. As Bloom puts it, in a Substack column:

The notion that we can explain human actions by single causes is silly….

Still, it’s notable how often humiliation comes up as a motivating force for certain big decisions. I’m a pluralist when it comes to motivation. I think there are all sorts of forces working on our psyches, and I’ll show them is only one of them. But it’s an important one.

We are social animals. We care intensely about how others perceive us. It feels great to be loved and respected by those we are close to and by members of the communities we identify with. It feels terrible to be maligned and disrespected, to feel that everyone we respect is laughing at us.

Drops in status occur all the time, but they’re usually gradual. In the sorts of acts of humiliation we’ve been talking about, it’s a shock—it happens all of a sudden. Now, in my examples, those who were humiliated were powerful men with good social support; they felt the blow, but they didn’t drop too far and were well-positioned to plan their comeuppance. 

If we are following Chinese thought, there are two ways to lose face. In the one, loss of face means loss of membership in a community-- being shunned, ostracized or rejected. In the other, loss of face means loss of status in a community, being treated as lesser than one is.

The most important point is that we are social animals. We are less concerned with developing our individuality than with belonging to a group and with having status within the group. 

One understands that you save face by recovering your status within a group or by reaffirming your membership within it. The tricky part is that face, your public reputation, involves how other people see you. As long as you do not have complete control over other people’s minds, you will have difficulty in influencing them.

Regardless of how you feel about yourself, you do not save face until and unless other people see you in a more positive light.

To state the obvious, the reason that cultures have emphasized face is that people identify you by seeing your face. Moreover, you are the only person who can never see your face directly. You can see your image reflected in a mirror or you can judge how you look to others by reading their reactions to you. But you can never look yourself directly in the eye. 

Face saving is not the same as self-actualization, self-creation, or self-narration. Psychology tends to see people as self-absorbed and self-involved monads. It considers group membership to be ancillary to an inner truth. 

Again, it is not sufficient to make a public spectacle of yourself. It is not sufficient to display your all-around wondrousness. These forms of self-assertion or even self-creation tend to affirm your being outside of all groups, impervious to the judgments of others.

In other terms, histrionics do not really count. Telling the world that you are the greatest does not make you the greatest. You only save face when you do something, when you succeed at something, despite it all. And when other people recognize your achievements, and see you as a member of the group. 

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