Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Is Shame Necessary 20150404

Brooklyn welcome. [applause] thank you for having me. Pull that close up to your face so we can hear you. I just noticed that the guilty planet blog this is the book about shame you have a career that draws you to these negative emotions and creating works around is that true . It is true. I think that there are reasons that well continue to draw negative emotions to especially for largescale problems involving the environment or Animal Welfare or labor abuses anything like that. I mean, when i first heard about this book i was curious because when we think about shaming, we think about all these i dont want city evil things but distasteful things you get into some of them you. Think about the scarlet letter. Think about tarring and feathering. And you think about religious people who are maybe using a model that is predemocratic. And so i expected to disagree with this book a little bit more than i ended up disagreeing with it because you do address those things. So explain a little bit how you came to this topic and how you ended up writing a book about reclaiming the value of shame. Well, i was comparing guilt and shame and the way theyd been used especially by the Environmental Movement especially over the last 20 to 30 years itch think old tools that activists reached for were primarily shaming tools. And now, todays movement is much more prone to reaching to guilt and diswaging that guilt with engaging guilty people through consumerism. So you feel guilty for flying or guilty for consuming pesticide, or guilty for supporting unfair labor, so you buy crueltyfree carbonneutral organic certified fair trade products. And my interest was in this dynamic in and the way we were engaging this minority of really concerned people and engaging them as consumers rather than as activists, and this tool of guilt then eclipsing what i would see as an older and more effective tool, shame in part because shame can scale to institutional levels, even to government levels, and an example i give in the book is sees senior chavez who protested the famous grape boycott, and would not have been satisfied if this ill the solution to that problem was industry saying, look were going to certify bart of the tart of the grapes that pay mike grant workers fair wages and well allow consumers who want to buy those grapes to purchase them and those grapes will have a label that say, public by farmworkers that earned a minimum wage and then allow the rest of consumers, who are unconcerned, to continue buying the same old thing. He would not have been i don think, satisfied with Something Like that because his concern was the changing the entire industry, not just a very small portion of it. This is the way now though, that we have come to engage with so many other problems. And so i think that this focus has an inherently shifted the burden to the demand side of the equation rather than the supply side. And shame really is still one of those tools that focuses on supply. So let me open that up. I youre like me you go to a progressive supermarket and you think youre doing the right thing because youre buying something with the organic label. We know a little bit more about how that organic label gets taken or used or gets in some cases bought, but it still seems like im doing this thing its a step in the right direction, the first step that is certainly better than buying the dirtiest of proproduce. But you actually flip that around and say its really not a great first step. Can you unpack that a little bit . Yes. I dont argue its not better. Theres no doubt that its better than buying the other thing. But if if you view it as your prime mar way of engaging that might detrimental. If you do something good in one domain then you can do something bad in another, and this is demonstrated as a followingal phenomenon across the board. Also again, i think what happened historically was that this really concerned minority would make trouble and raise the ire of certain people and then the majority would sort of step out of the way and what has happened now instead is that the really concerned minority now just goes to whole foods and that is not sufficient for changing the entire market. So even organic foods, one of the Fastest Growing sectors, people think is highly visible. Still only accounts for four percent of the u. S. Food market. That just shows you, its not leading to a significant decrease in Pesticide Usage and if threat our end goal because if everyone else is eating nonorganic food and its getting in ore water supply we have to consider engaging maybe at a higher level. I want to get into this question of how you came to this. I think you were involved in looking into fisheries . Yes. Could you explain how that all came about and what that led you to understood about the labeling problem. I studied economic soyuz was interested in supply and demand and i was interested in microeconomics, the household consumer. I got interested in these tools like wallet cards and ecolabels for seafood, and this let me i sort of pulled on the thread, and this whole thing unraf done raveled. And they all had Similar Properties in that there was a tendency to lower the standards of what those things actually meant, because that meant more things could be certified because theres actually more demand than supply can meet. So in the case of fisheries the idea of what is sustainable has been that bar has just lowered and lowered over time and also i was mentioning i dont see any of these products representing more than 10 of the entire marketplace. So, in terms of what kind of big solution they offer, its really the jury is still very far from in. Did you you studied economics for six years . As an undergrad and then master student, and then i decided to come to my senses and did my ph. D as a biologist. Im amatessed you still speak english so well after the study of economics. This all really started when you were a girl. You saw video of did you just see you saw the can first and the labeling. I saw a photograph. I opened the book with the case of me and feeling the most my First Experience with guilt that was not just about something i had done and affected those around me, but actually affecting somebody i never met before a wild dolphin. So i got a photograph in the mail because id written those group called the Earth Island Institute when i was nine years old, and opened up the return letter and it was all about how tuna fishing was killing dolphins and there was this very very, i would say now scarring image of a dolphin being hoisted and killed onboard the tuna boat. Some that was my first it was very profound feeling of guilt for something i had done that had affected something that i cared about and had never met. And i was not alone in that at awe all. There were so many millions of School Children who insisted their parents boycott tuna and that led to the dolphin safe logo and that is one of those logo us i was suggesting is one of these red flags about how we engage with the issue. As soon as the logo was introduced, we began buying tuna again, and i thought that the trouble was over. And thats so i realize now the fallacy in thinking that way. I was nine. Fair enough. But some of this you came to unpack a little bit more later. This i maybe the seed that was planted. What you end up describing very early in the book is how that shift happens, puts the onus on consumers rather than on the corporations or on governments. The dolphinsafe logo was the first ecolabel of its type. Prior to that it had been the organic food label was the earliess. That signaled something about the product itself. Said this strawberry is actually fundamentally different than this other strawberry. This says the tuna is the same about i was caught differently. So i earmark this as a big moment in environmental history if you think of that as being a big moment but i think it does for me ill really characterized the shift extracting us from focusing on supply and focusing on demand. You give other examples of how Even Economic incentives incentives and disincentives can actually do shortterm good maybe but then have longterm negative consequences. One that stuck out was the israeli day care center. Very famous example. Can you unpack that . There was a pretty famous study on daycares in israel were parentsre coming too late too often, and so the daycare said, were tired of the parents coming so late. Were going to introduce a fine. And when they did that, the number of late pickups actually increased significantly. Because parents thought oh, what a relief. I all i have to do is pay a fine now. So where they had had this guilt or shame prior, they replaced that with a marketbased punishment and the daycare realized this quickly and tried to change their policy back, and they never could get the number of late pickups as low again. So, theyve actually in theres been more research subsequently but showing how markets and the willingness to exchange a behavior for money can actually erode the standard. Right. So, some of this has to do with just to dive in on this guilt versus shame you describe guilt as an individual feeling that is tethered to maybe a subjective bar that we all have inside us, that can vary across people. I think thats where shame becomes preferable because shame is not as individualistic . I describe guilt as a tool, if you want to theres the emotion and then also the tool and it is the tool to regulate your own behavior. Its the your internal dialogue between you and your conscience. Shame is about the threat of social exposure or exposure to public program. And for that reason its much more calibrated to the entire group, and the really interesting thing is that for that reason, shame can scale up to institutions, to governments to a marketplace even in a way that guilt really cant. You cant say that google has some sort of internal conscience but you could worry google does worry vary much about its public reputation. They scalability is interesting. You also talk about some examples that are i think we talk about how guilt hasnt worked in some of these cases or how putting it on to the consumer points to the consumers guilt rather than keeping the onus on the collective principle. You talk about norms. Talk now that we have been into this conversation for a little while. Its a wonderful read and very scholarly butler fast read so i enjoyed it very much. Theres just so many examples. What are some of your favorites of the tool of shame working really well. Yes. So again, i just want to caveat by saying guilt is a great regulator and we should all hope that society could be dealt with so well because its the cheapest form but if it doesnt work and if youre left wondering why and if the government is also failing you in certain ways enforcing rules or failing to pass legislation then you might turn to harsher forms of punishment. A few examples i like are the rain forest action and the sierra club, looking at mountaintop removal in appalachia and trying to work with local governments to get it stopped. Failing that aspect failed. So instead they they werent able to go after really the Coal Companies because consumers north fame to this Coal Companies. Instead they traced the financing hoff the Coal Companies to nine banks and published the nine banks year after year and how to they were financing, at what scale and that started in 20 10. Last year was the fifth year of the campaign and wells fargo and j p morgan announced they were cutting ties with the coal company. So this is not obviously stopping mountaintop removal entirely but it is halting the progress and making the other banks very afraid about the way the standards are tipping. Another example i like is green peace, they went after a bunch of big box retailers for selling unsustainable sea footed, and they would rank the retailers and year after year are year trader joes kept coming up in the bottom third of this ranking. And they said thats so strange because the consumer that trader joes really care. So in 2009 they launched the traitor joes campaign. They took out a full page ad in the new york times. They had demonstrations at many trader joes across the nation. They had a really cool internet platform where their volunteers could use that platform to call managers around the nation and it sent a singing fish telegram, begging to stop selling unsustainable seafoods. I was playful and also intense exposure, and as a result trader joes moved up that campaign very church its very obvious as a result from Something Like 19th on the list to fourth on the list, and gave up a lot of their now, did that solve the problem of selling unsustainable seafood . No. Are we eventually going to need i think probably serious legislation in place . Yes. But shaming can act as a stop gap in a way that i dont see any evidence of guilt really working at that scale. Yes. I want to come back to that because it seems like where we have gone we started with the consumer looking at labels to sort of more suppliers. Eventually we need to get to government. We can. But before we move on i want to throw back something you said. Guilt is the cheapest form of this tool. What does that mean . Is that economic lingo . It is not if you think about punishment from an evolutionary aspect, and they line up in cost. Punishment is costly. Its very interesting, too. Punishment this is getting really technical but punishment and reward are really different in the sense that reward is me transferring something great, nobel prize to you. But punishment is like me taking a hit of some form some small cost or you can imagine like itself was a physical confrontation, potentially a large cost, to then deprive you of something. So we both wind up paying a cost. And we can see this. Punishment in society, at the individual and the government level, are all costly. Prison is a very costly system. Right . And not yes economic terms, but just in terms of resources, effort whatever. So imagine the best form of punishment is where you punish yourself, you bear the cost. Of changing the behavior. Exactly. Thats what get is supposed to do. So when a little kid asks why die feel pain . Why does pain exist . That to keep your body in intact and prevent you from doing harm. So guilt and shame are similar but guilt is maybe aiming more at the individual just to bead beat a dead horse the self. Thats why is debate whether guilt is a universal emotion and a universal tool. A lot of eastern cultures dont have a word for guilt. Shakespeare used the word guilt 33 times, used the word shame 344 times. Its very likely that guilt is a much more recent much more we were much more individualistic concept, and emotion than shame is. So if were in the territory of guilt, were potentially in very subjective territory, where i could drink away my guilt and go and hide and might not lead to better behavior if im a ceo or a politician or something. Yes, and the shame is true of shame. Either of these things were perfect we wouldnt have harsher forms of punish. Arrest look at bad examples of shame. Thats always fun. Shaming is a said before its something i have negative connotations toward, and you have plenty of examples in the book of the new potentials for use of shame in knew media, but at its worst it can lead to maybe things not going well, the behavior or the norm not changing, people hiding from shame, i think appear in your book. Talk about the different kinds of results you can get to with shame. Its not just at the individual level. Corporations and governments all display these similar behaviors and the various ways you can escape shaming. So the different responses to shame i open up that chapter with a case very charming, actually of bruceis may the own are othe titanic who was on board the night the titanic went down and he unlike the captain, managed to escape and survive, and he felt a tremendous amount of well, whether or not he felt it we cant say because i dont know what he looked like. I didnt measure his hormones and thats the only way to know somebodys internal state. But he exhibited a lot of signs of having been shamed. One of the first things he did on the boat that picked up the survivors, is he inverted his name in the cables so, rather than signing ismay he sign him nice yamsi, and actually joseph conrad, who attended some of the hearings about the titanic, referred to him as the luckless yansi, and he also was in hiding on she ship. He wouldnt come out and face anyone. These are two of like signs that the shaming is really powerful and you may or may not be getting the ideal outcome afterwards. In lit temporary terms sometimes shame are is equated with your social persona dying. Its really intense. So he was removing himself from the things he loved which were society. He was hiding. He said he wasnt going out in public. And he was changing his identity. Shame latches ton reputation. So we also see Phillip Morris preferring to be called altrea or bp considering changing its name after the deep water horizon. Blackwater changed its name. You can see these similar tendencies, among groups government its much harder to change but it still does happen. Change the parties. You change parties. Or change the name of a technique, like torture becomes enhanced interrogation technique. Right. So online examples appear. I dont know if you read the new john ronson book with the example of justine sacca but there were a lot of examples of maybe shaming going awry with newie and what people have learned. Maybe its not always pleasant. You draw the line between a kind of shaming that changes bad behavior on one hand without ruining a life on the other hand and that seems to be the is that part of what you described in the chapter called the sweet spot of shaming. Like antibiotics, depending on the right dose at the right time and you can overdue it or underdo it. One issue with the internet comes back to individuals and individual behavior but is right now what we see as disproportionate punishment. That individuals who are saying something glib are being punished in a much harsher much more longlasting form, than people who commit actual physical crimes. And this is a strange moment that i actually dont think is going to last that much longer. Part of the disproportionate aspect is because theres so much anonymity online and because its had so far been the sort of wild west and were seeing all of that reined in at the moment. Id be remiss during the last day of black History Month if i didnt proudly mention your example of rosa parks. How does she fit into this story of using shame well and Martin Luther king of course. It was just a great line of Martin Luther kings, in the book about how which i included in the book about how the purpose of the monterrey bus boycott was to shame and open up a feeling of shame moral shame, in the the oppressors and so part the boycott was so strategic, which is so fascinating and it was designed to attract attention and to the reputation it was attacking was more about the system as a whole than anything to do with montgomery specifically and this is so what i think is the essence of really smart and strategic shaming, something that goes after a deeper system some that is why i contrast some of these examples with individual, like you were mentioned justin sachow with somebody like matt binder which has a public shaming site eye. No comparing him to Martin Luther king but rather than going after individuals he goes after groups, swaths of people that say sort of similar things, trying to its not searchable. Trying to sort of shame america or get america in general to sort of selfreflect racist comments, along the same lines. I think this is more interesting form of shaming. The attacking a person a lot of the examples you look at were couldbert, jon stewart, theyre hugely popular and i think you cited the idea that stewart was listed as the most popular news anchor. Most trusted, which is a big most trusted, right, of course oreilly is the most popular although he is not an anchor but most trusted news anchor who happens to be doing the news on a comedy channel. Right. So if you think about ridicule and satire, these are very cheap forms of punishment. When we talk about expense. Right . They allow you to say what you think really bluntly, allow people to laugh at it, and allow the transgressor to easily sort of change their behavior in response without some big apology or its not as confrontational because of the element of laughter . Is that the idea . I dont know if its the element of laughter but definite not as confrontational. Off see this as the first form of punishment in hunter gathererrer societies, ridicule and jest. Thats just the lowest, cheapest sort of least harsh form of punishment there is, and yet in some ways the think jon stewart is so clever again not just for the ridicule but for pivoting our attention and refocusing it on those bigger systems issues taking the Brian Williams case and pivoting it more about weapons of mass destruction in crosswalk the voracity of that in iraq and the veracity of that argument. Shifting it to the government. To the government or if the media is so interested in the truth, where were they then . You also talk about gossip and how did one another cheap form. But this is related to jon stewart and stephen colbert, a lot of gossip is sort of maybe a more primitive way of tearing people down or bad midmichiganing people punishing them for thing Wes Department like about them which is a roundabout way of shaming them. You can have a really cynical view of humanity once you look at the data and say, wow, twothirds of what we do when we talk is gossip about other people and about 90 of that is negative. At least in certain studies. It would be interesting to look at subcultures. But when you think deeply about that, i think it makes sense in the sense that you dont think about your relationship or think about you often dont talk about the really great thing. You talk about the bad things in the hopes of improving them and also if you think about society at large, people that are doing a great job while we should certainly applaud them and thank them theyre not the people that concern us most and that is, i think, just a fundamental aspect. This is why in delinquent taxpayers, theres about 20 states now that shame delinquent taxpayers online, and you could say, well why not reach for something more positive . Why do we have to expose the people who dont do it. Should we expose the people who pay their taxes . This is absurd. An absurd idea. We expect people to pay their tacks. 90 of people do pay their tacks. So it would be strange to have a system of positive reinforcement for that. One of the first things you learn in psychology 101 classes is that as a parent maybe positive reinforcement is supposed to be preferrable to neglect testify punish; but maybe in Group Situations that doesnt bear out in the studies youre looking at. I think that is absolutely true. That positive reinforcement is the better tool and certainly for parenting, but in threshold cooperation dilemmas where we need a certain amount of people to cooperate or the whole system falls apart, probably not the first thing we reach to or not say who are the people who matter to us most . Were interested in the people who are ruining it for everybody else. So, let talk about how this book is very unique, because most of us would try to write a book about shame and we would look at it through literature through maybe some books on economics and things. You were able to even do some of your own experiments. Is that right . Could you describe some of those that have given new data and new impetus to this idea about shaming. One of the interesting things about shame when we talk about the market, is that a lot of experiments on punishment in the lab are used monetary forms of punishment. I introduced, along with my colleagues, the concept of lets just have it by reputational. Well play cooperative games in which students can earn real money, and at the end of the game we told them at the beginning this is the case well tell them that well expose the two least cooperative out of the six players and in another treatment we did the two most cooperative. What i love about this is that something it predates capitalism redates money predates barter and trade. This is just about reputation. This is getting to something that is very fundamentally human, and that threat and the promise of honor, actually both led to an increase in cooperation on the basis of, again no cost other than what youre getting in terms of reputation. So, take us through this. You do most of these at ny new. I was actually at uvc when i did this one. You have student inside. Yep. They come to the lab and have the choice to give or not give over the course of ten round so what we call public good, and each get 10 at the start of the game. They can give a dollar or not at each round, and then whatever is given to the public good is doubled and redistributed evenly among all players, even those that didnt cooperate. And this is very much like a School Project in the sense that theres an ensivetive to a group innocent tonight a Group Project aft school and an incentive for individuals to free ride but if everyone free ride, everyone fails. So you need some people doing some work. And that these games are so interesting because some people do give some people dont. Theres often very low levels of overall cooperation and this is what we saw, this threat of just exposing at the end of the game the two least or the two most did increase their willingness to give. So that was the main one you did. Did you do others . Did you look at other experiments . I did. I mention a couple in the book. Im asking people in certain other games what types of if they could know the identity of certain players, who would they want to know . And overwhelmingly people want to know the least cooperative player and they are less interested in the most kind of confirming what i was just telling you about. Some something that i talk about in the become that i think you wouldnt find necessarily in a normal book about shame is animal experiments that i might dont run but are really fascinating in terms of their animals that have highly social lives wind up showing a lot of the same behaviors and manipulation that we do. So was really interested in finding some of those analogs. The one that comes to mind are the sparrows yes that was a key study the first to show the power of deception in animal societies. What is interesting is i could explain the experiment in full but what it really got at was that even sparrows, little birds, use as extra simple. They dont have shaming. Its hard to expose the individual to the group but they use as extra simple against those trying to deceive the flock. Talking it would be good to come up with find effective ways to shame. Yes. That was one of the chapters in the book the seven habits of highly effective shaming, not the same it can be used for anything. You can this is the whole soft power thing we talked about but it really could. Shame itself, were trying to say, is kind of it has a Bad Reputation but can be a neutral tool for good or ill. Yes. What are the best just what are those seven or those most important seven habits. One of the way is wanted to really focus on our attention, which let me start by saying attention is the bedrock of shaming because the audience is so much a part of the tool. And our attention is finite and were all being asked to be part of the audience for some sort of shaming technique every single day. So where should you either focus your shaming or focus your attention on somebody else doing the shaming and what should you worry about as an individual for potentially being shamed . These were sort of my main drivers in outlining these seven habits. The first one, which i think is the most important actually is that the audience should be fundamentally concerned with the transgression, and there are just certain things where we are really not interested in exposure. So i cite an app that is very popular, where you can expose companies or restaurants for doing the wrong thing. I mean theres a case where this guy exposed the Thai Restaurant for delivering his thai food 30 minutes late. I dont care. Im sorry your food was late and maybe but the restaurant does care, of course because this is attacking their reputation and they do respond to these sites. I think its a misuse of the audiences attention for things like this. Because it only affected this one person. Exactly. I think its between them and the thai company, and you could argue, oh but wed all get Better Service in this regard. What i say is yeah, but we wind up losing the power of shame for another harmful activity that did affect all of us. Another good example of a trivial one is this app that tells you tells all of your friend if you push the the snooze button. I just really dont care if my friends oversleep. So this is not a but the idea is, ill get up the first time because people will see how many time is hit snooze . Yes. Im not convinced thats very effective because were not the victims victims of the transgression. Unless my boss follows it or something. Exactly. So somebody who would be. So maybe if it went straight to your boss this would be a better tool. Right. That gets exactly to my point, which is whoever is asking to be part of the audience, they should in some ways be a victim or fundamentally concerned with that transgression. So that is my of all the seven, thats the most important, the most social and shaming is a very social tool that does rely on the audience. The more it gets as fundamentally social questions, the more effective it would be. I was thinking about how you said the body or person being shamed has to care about the audience that is participating in the shaming. And i thought of something that somebody once said to me about the u. S. Sanctions against burma that the sanctions worked better in the it was slowly working its way towards possibly working but part of the reason it didnt is those hard willlinessers didnt care what europe or america thought about them. So that is what i thought of in terms of the audience doing the shaming. It also gets back to my trader joes example a little bit because, for instance, other retailers are obviously low on that list and a retailer like win n disk weas lower than trader joes but green peace would have a hard time going against winn dixie because its managers are less aligned with the green peace agenda so it had that mismatch between the people trying to do the shaming and the people asked to be part of the audience. Were in a moment where youre an expert on this moment that were in a way that maybe we could benefit from. Seems like a lot of emphasize, even under obama is how afraid we should be of terrorism, which affects relatively few people whereas it seems like the big impetus behind the book i Climate Change which could conceive my escalate and do so very rapidly into affecting and even killing a lot more people than terrorism has. It seems like the agenda behind this book, although thats another negative word perhaps the impetus, the heart of the book, is Climate Change. Is that true . It is certainly one of the many yes. Climate change and overfishing are my two big research agendas. But i would also say Something Like Animal Welfare and labor rights. Those are all part. When you say that shame is can be a tool for Different Things you wanted this book to be out there potentially for fellow activists. Is that right . Yes. Could i have just easily written the exact same book and then the examples from things like stopping abortion or stopping any controls on gun says and used examples like that. I chose examples that fit sort of my agenda if you will on the other hand i would argue my concerns are a bit more social in nature. It depends on your constituency. If theyre unborn children, thin abortion is your key issue. But i this is one of the sort of subtle messages in the book and kind of gets at your terrorism versus Climate Change issue, which is who do we really consider part of the group . Who are we acting on behalf of . When we say social, who is our society . Who is the audience . And so im interested in with climate, how its disproportionalitily affects developing countries, poor people generally also certainly certain animals. Marine calcifying organisms. This is a group i would consider myself closely aligned with. You mentioned early a passing example, of how the american system of slavery showed how the laws often need to do a lot of work to catch up with morality or with social you call them norms. So it seems to me like one of the big emotional impetuses behind the book is theres not a lot of accountability in certain spheres, whether its the environment we didnt signed the quioto protocol. Theres a lot of terrible things happening by omission and seems like the impetus behind the book and the impetus behind shaming, youre dealing with corruption by omission and you need to change the norms and get the laws to help. When you come to shame youre so put off by the word and then you get to the end of the book and youre like yeah, we really need this because theres so much that is not happening. If you think bet the democratic Justice System, which i happen to be a big fan of. Due process is something i think were all thankful for. But if you think about the dep privilege deprivation, life in the hands of the state,atively new on in the whole scene of punishment compared to others. Physical safety. So you can break somebodys arm. Not available to you or me for good reasons im very thankful for. Then there who are others resources. So, twothirds of americans reporting they experienced the silent treatment at some point in the last year. Youre actually denying somebody language and then also money. Anything can falls that category. And then reputation. So what is interesting to me is only resources and reputation are available to us as citizens, as civilians, and those two things are also only available to us at the international level, because there is no democratic Justice System. There are there is no binding treaty yet internationally for climate, and so what do we have . What do we really have that we can deny people or institutions or governments of if they dont behave how we, Society Civil society, wants them to . And in a way shaming is as you point out this sort of indicator, the rise of it, the need for it, that other systems are failing us. But it also means that the way we use it and when we reach for it, should be really strategic and really sort of as i was saying with antibiotics sparing, i think, to keep it a powerful tool. Because you can lose the audiences addition the little boy would cried wolf so it has to match the offense, lets say. And just an example that is quite compelling in 2004, there was a decision Amnesty International and several other human Rights Groups would go after, with a concerted shaming campaign, the United States for being one of seven country friday the world that is still executed juvenile offenders since 1990. The other were like yemen nigeria, iran iraq and they used a map of the world to demonstrate this, and there were other things as well some interesting science and a lawsuit, but the Supreme Court overruled the decision in 2005, and the question was, what other tool could have been used again there is no prison. We cant put america in jail. We couldnt kill america maybe this would happen at some longer time scale. But this reputation really is one of those things we can use against an entire country an entire system. Well, think maybe we could open it up to questions here and but before we do lets hear one more time for our visitor, jennifer jacquet. Thank you for having me. [applause] if you want to ask a question, that airs microphone over here and i ask you to get in line and come over there, because otherwise we might not hear you, and were here with our friends from cspan. Also after the q a part if your not too shy to ask a question, we have folks selling the book, and if were so lucky jennifer will stay and sign your book. Great. So any questions . If youre too shy to stand up, you can shout them out and ill just repeat them into the microphone. We have someone going to the microphone now. Can you hear me . Yes. I have a question. I think that ive not read the book dish. Get right toupe the microphone. Sorry. You can turn it down. So thinking as to listening to what you were saying and the examples you were giving seems extremely compelling the power of shame to make social changes and in particular the effect it has on reputation and people take it personally and try to adjust their behavior to match the reputation they intend to have. Thats remarkable. I was thinking like, havent be been exposed to exactly these kind of tools for exactly the opposite that were now arent we using similar tools . I feel that, for instance advertisement has its very powerful shaming. They expose you, in the u. S. In particular, very clear what is the brand you should buy and what their products you should be its extremely clear what is the not good anymore, and they use exactly that social pressure, that if you have some friends over and if they dont go to your bedroom lets say, maybe you can have it very old fashioned, last season, whatever, but if they will come to your backyard where you have a party, then youre supposed to have you take the shame to wherever your reputation would be exposed. I feel like its a technique we have seen used in lots of ways, and we see advertisements who use it for companies beautifully, i would say, and its just i think the problem is not the tool. Is more how do you bring it to the cause that interests you without exactly the amount of money or resources. I understand youre talking big organizations that have the nonprofits activist, but how could one do it more individually . I think that some of these would require a lot of individuals taking small next to other individuals and hopefully have a wave to promote behavioral changes. Es greatquestion, is shame possible to use as an individual . I know that wasnt the whole question but that was compelling. You mean individual against another individual . I think that was the end of the question was yes, whether individuals can use shame. The pound of the book is you kind of need an audience. Dont all of you have mothers . I have a lot of ive seen a lot of individual uses of shame on other individuals in my day, but i it works, sure. It can work. It can backfire. It can lead to worse behavior. It has always those options for the exact same characteristics. The with a i say advertising is a bit different is that ive defined shame very specifically in the book as theres behavior, that behavior is not uniform because thats important right . If behavior was uniform across everyone like imagine trying to shame people for i dont know Something Like im trying to think of a good example something petty . Im looking for something where you would three meals a day. When we all do similar things the behavior is uninteresting. The shame is unnecessary. Yes, if the behavior is uniform. So you need some variance in behavior. Then ill think of a good example but shame is the way ive defined it is exposing a minority who are exhibiting the worst behavior. So that i had to take a very specific way of defining it so i didnt wind up going down every single track because what jamie is doing is like all these other tools, competing four our attention. That by definition thats quite different than an ad or which is competing four our attention and encouraging certain forms of consumption but its not exactly shaming. The shaming is secondary or much further down the road in a social system. That is very classbased on consumerbased. Might be anxiety maybe more than shame that the advertisers are peddling. I thought how the book goes in and out of shame into other emotions and when you get into the Martin Luther king example, theres this element of your opponent youre maybe trying to shame also has to potentially have some maybe choice to maybe have compassion towards your campaign in some cases. Not in all cases. But shame in the book clearly butts up against many other emotions and tools. I think one advertising inadequacy, making you feel less about yourself there is they are tapping into these things, so i dont think is guess i wouldnt define it as shaming. I see you point, and all ill say is that which is how i behind end the book were at a crossroads for create something really big new important standards of behavior, in terms of climate and welfare justice. I dope think well get there without Something Like shaming involved. I see we have another question. Thank thank you so much for the conversation. I have win comment and one question the comment i would have is in freak onomics they talk about three areas of economic, social and moral so i when i heard your comment about shame, i figure its more in the social realm, whereas guilt would fit in the moral one. And they, too sort of suggest the moral is the more effective one versus creating financial incentives. Like the Daycare Center situation. The question on the is regards to shame is who is qualified, either as an individual or an entity to bring about the shaming of lets say the other party . Who is what . Who is authorized or who is qualified. I think we heard a little about bit it, as long as were all pass participants, the east yes way is to say youre not part of the society. An example, which i dont know is if in your book would the rerecent thinks you hear about hackers and them going after government and corporate institutions about Consumer Privacy the whole irony is the consumer becoming aware of something about themselves, government institutions losing reputation, and then feeling either fuzzy about this notion of a hacker and what they can do to infiltrate my privacy which was intended to be private in the first place but have to expose it to show the shame, and, therefore, take one problem to a second problem. So if you can comment about regimes going after other regimes, and is that the right sort of example of shame . The hacker case is really interesting. Anonymous being one of the most visible groups of hackers elm went to a great talk about them. So, a few things. Hacking, like shame, can be used by the weak against the strong. It can also be used by the strong against the weak of course. When we tend to be simple athletic is when its the weak against the strong. Were has cool with the government or google going in than we are with anonymous for some reason. And unless its some major breach of security that makes us all feel uncomfortable. So what makes shaming more acceptable rather than effective . Which is the kind of version 2. 0. In terms of the hacking structure more generally, i think hacking offends us or worries us for those exact reasons that shaming worries us, because of the lack of due process, the lack of democratic Justice System that we have all sort of gotten used to and it makes us feel like were back in the wild west days where were experiencing some vigilantism, and your neighbors could come into your house and enforce their own rules on you. And a lot of us are hesitant to return to a system like that. On the other hand, theres the counterargument thats the other side has gotten too strong, so there are reasons to expose them for that. I just will say that yeah im a fan of the democratic Justice System and i think its one of those things that doesnt seem to matter as much until it happens to you and then youre really left wondering if it was a really good decision to allow these things to happen. So i think in other words they share those two properties very much and make us all a little nervous. I think theres another question. Thank you. Very interesting talk you have been giving mitchell interest in this subject is particular one which is whether the people who support the palestinians are using shame effectively or as effectively as they could again this israelis . Rather than go into that subject, which is probably fraught with controversy, think of south africa and whether shame was used effectively in south africa and whether i think you suggested that nobody is shameless, but i wonder whether, for example, putin could beshamed into changing his behavior in ukraine. So i guess just generally how is it you talked its permeated but how is shame used against oppressive or governments you dont agree with . Those are really Big Questions for someone more qualified on the political spectrum than i am. The only thing ill say is that most of the time, if you have somebody with power, theres an audience they care about somewhere, and so theres an example i cite in the book about russian ceos dont respond to negative press in russian newspapers but they do respond to negative press in anglo newspapersespecially the wall street journal, and have been noted to resign in the face of that kind of scrutiny. Which is just interesting that the audience that matters to them is not their in group per se. So i think there are these strange aknock liz. Anomalies. What your worry about, at least for me at the global scale, our countries that appear to not want to be part of the group at all. And that just makes us, again, all feel like a little bit on edge like, what can we do to rein the countries in . Should they get powerful weapons or terrorists or whatever . And north korea i mention this in the book because they tend to be one of those countries and then joined the world cup in 2012, and because they aid greed to be part of the global group for that, they got all this scrutiny and backlash during the world cup that apparently they decided not to be part of the world cup again. So this is the question right . Do we how do we balance to me theres such fascinating questions because its not about individual psychology always. Its about these scaling features and do we treat north korea like we would the ostracized kid on the playground. Its an interesting challenge. One thing is for certain is that were moving toward a globalized structure in which we are all interconnected and feel as a tighter global group and this is inevitably going to mean some norms and standards really butting up against one another and figuring out who wins and how. You responded to that question by pointing out that people with more of a political background than your economic background might be able to answer but you have examples. Like kenneth ross from human rights watch. He admits one of his greatest tools is just shaming these regimes that fail on human rights records. But he, for instance, did have better luck with the United States than with yemen. So they have to feel like theyre part of the community that is shaming them. Or they have something to lose. This is also theres a legal scholar i quote who says the ultra rich and the ultra poor are insulated from shaming. Talking about individuals, but because one has the power of wealth and the other has nothing to lose. And so this is also, i think, true even at the global scale. You have to have something to lose for it to matter. You want to shout your question from your seat . Okay. Ill repeat it, in. [inaudible conversations] question. I. Are whistle blowers shamers . I think so, because theyre exposing often a transgression especially with some of the techniques, like video, and i guess im thinking when you say whistleblower my mind goes to Animal Rights work because of all the counterlegislation that has been proposed recently but maybe you have other cases in mind. [inaudible] i kind of define it as anyone exposing a transgression to public disapproval, and exactly. Anybody who is in that position in the who isle blowing and one of the ways to make shame more powerful is to present a whole bunch of irrefutable evidence and that makes the information hard to and then because one of the counterstrategies is to say the source of the shaming has no credibility, and to try to undermine it but if the facts so prevailing the face of that attacker it may not matter the shamers reputation has been destroyed and that has happened over and over again on the global scene. You mentioned snowedden in the book you mentioned wikileaks, and one of the counterstrategies is one is hiding and the other is destroying the reputation of the messenger, and that certainly was the case with snowden and julian awe assaug, and we learn from trial and error we have situation where the powerful cant be confronted with their own transgressions so we protect whistleblowers, and it becomes very to unravel that and you get into it in the back. So unless there oar questions i see one oh, now you dont have to get up, everyone will just shout out their questions. Lets look at the time to make sure we have time for the signing of lets do dish saw three hands. Just do them all and ill answer them all. I saw that hand first in the back. [inaudible question] two people being outed and then you wanted to hear all the questions at once . I saw another hand over here. Hi. How are you doing . Im wondering you define your definition of shame. I wonder if you can define guilt. And im thinking about your is may and the titanic and meat me think about the [inaudible] and how im interested in the complexity of the question if i would be in this position, what i have done . It by think we as an audience have to look at him and blame him as the captain. So im curious about your definition of guilt as opposed to shame. Youre saying why do i think he says feeling shame instate of guilt . Uhhuh. And then i think i saw that hand. And then can you remember four . Yes. Ill check back with you. [inaudible question] the purpose of shaming was [inaudible question] [inaudible question] [inaudible question] [inaudible question] [inaudible question] ill start with the last one first because i can remember it easily sorry, yes. [inaudible question] [inaudible question] okay, great. Ill start with that one, then. I get michael sandal has written about this too ands of market societies generally rather than a market economy and guilt is a close friend of the market than shame because it can be assuaged by decisions to buy certain things of others. That is my sort of in my main argument and there may be others including the sort of metta norm we have in the u. S. About the individual over the group, and guilt being much more individualistic than shame, and i think that all fits in nicely. My freedom to choose and its just a perfect storm that allows guilt to take off. [inaudible] when you tend to look at the shift from focusing on supply to demand the last major, at least environmental legislation, being in the 70s it really feels like i consider i was born in 1980 and am a reagan baby and i consider that to be the moment but there oar other scholars that argue it was happening sooner. As for the kind of work i do. I do the rate cal work on shaming and theoretical work on shaming. Its just the premise is just cooperation and has to do with money so its not really some of the games are framed around Climate Change but some are how they make decisions in the lab, so i dont i havent at least yet, taken any aims or targets, and i work on individuals, which is kind of frustrating because im actually interested in the group level but its hard to do that experimentally. So most of the experiments in fact are on individuals. That is a problem i would say. As for groups i like, i tend to like groups that are less in bed with corporations, because i tend to see them as acting more on behalf of Civil Society than on the interests of the market. So i in doing this research, it was so interesting the names that kept popping up. Rain forest action network, green peace, friends of the earth. These are groups that have strong policies against taking corporate money, and that gives them financial distance to then still human rights watch, theyre not beholding to the ceo of bp who might be on their board of directors sort of thing. So that tended to be the kind of group that i was looking up to but im sure in every sphere or domain people would have a different answer to that question. Thats my own. As for how i think the u. S. Is whether or not its democracy is failing or whether or not shame can even really serve us when the powerful have and the corporations have such interests. When you look at in terms of Climate Change now recent work showing this is not being represented the decisions are not democratic decisions. Minority is making the decision against the democratic will. But i still see reputation as being one of the most important tools in that battle. Dont see how to get around it. What else do we plan to attack in organizing for action just last week sent an email how you can tweet or send an email to the x number i think there were 15 climate deniers in congress and they singled them out and they were using that social pressure too. So i still see it as being fundamental, even to the democratic process, even though it does lack, is a mentioned, some of those issues like due process, that i think we have all grown accustomed to. Ismay the speed memory round. Im impressed. The titanic owner, he so i should be clear i dont know whether or not he felt guilt you say that in the book. What i can say is this is what im very interested in experimentally. Do people change their behavior in the face of public exposure or the threat of public exposure . And what it seems about ismay his behavior fundamentally changed after the titanic went down. Not only in those few days but for life in general. He lived out his days alone in ireland, and so i say that he was shamed, and how he reconciled that in his own mind well never know because he didnt write about it. But i think its a really again, whether or not you want to call that guilt or shame internally, im not sure it matters, especially because thing likes survivor guilt in general some sometimes manifest in the same exact ways we say shame does. And finally im not very familiar with the two cases you mentioned so im sure you would have more to say on them than i would. I have a google for shame and i try to read them every day but theres more than you can ever, ever consume. It as big one. That was the last part was very fun to watch, just rolling those questions become. I think well end it there, and were going to have a signing here with jennifer jacquets book, and i want to thank you guys for coming to the book and Public Library lets hear it for our guest. Thank you for having me. Thank you for your attention. [applause] if you want a book suggest make going up around that way getting in line along the back aisle, and then coming down the aisle their get it signed. Thanks again. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] youre watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on cspan2s booktv. Television for serious readers. The book is about why we shouldnt legalize marijuana. And we wrote it because we saw this train coming down the track, legalization, as we speak, alaska has just legalized general Recreational Use and Public Opinion has shifted very much in that direction. And pretty dramatically. Maybe even more dramatically than gay marriage the shift in Public Opinion to the favor able side. And 20 years, 20 years ago 20 of the American People were in favor of legalization, now Something Like 60 . And given the evidence we thought it important to write this book and no one else seem to be writing and it i dont think anybody has, about why this is a bad idea. The other thing is this is very relevant is as Public Opinion has softened on marijuana, maybe 60 of people in favor of legalization, the Scientific Evidence is overwhelming against it. I was drug czar director of National Drug control policy 8990. We didnt have this research but now its overwhelming harm that marijuana does, and i have to believe, want to believe the American People are not informed of these facts and so the point of the book was to get these facts out so they can make a second judgment on this an informed decision. Get to the end of my story. I think in colorado, which has been kind of ground zero here, they will reconsider at the end of the day to try to put this genie back in the aboutle and recrime as because theyre starting to see recalls. You can watch th