Over the course of the past four years or so, I have been studying shame in its many different expressions. Here is a list of some of the places I have found it.

Shame in Evolution and Natural History

There is an overwhelming consensus that shame is an adaptation. It is one of the ‘self-conscious emotions’ that enable us to interact socially to a much higher degree than other animals are capable of. The other self-conscious emotions include pride, guilt, and embarrassment. All normal people feel them, but definitely not to the same extent. A number of studies have found that women, on average, feel more shame and men feel more pride. Studying shame from an evolutionary perspective is one way to begin pondering why this might be and what it signifies for the way human societies have patched themselves together since the mid-Pleistocene — about 1.8 million years ago, a time when (many cultural anthropologists believe) that early humans began treating each other very differently.

Shame and Gender

“Shame is organized by gender,” according to Brene Brown, a pop-psychologist who represents the leading voice in the study of shame in popular culture today. I bristled when I first heard this, feeling that shame was absolutely identical in how men and women experienced it.

Well, I was wrong. I was so wrong, that the topic eventually reconfigured what I conceived to be the major sex differences. Women feel more shame than men, and men feel more pride than women. There are hormonal foundations for these findings, as well as MRI studies which, in a nutshell, show the different parts of the brain that light up in men and women in relation to shameful mental experiences. Over time, I began to realize that shame probably had a lot to do with how human males and females first began to get along as well as they do (and if you don’t think they get along, take a look at how chimpanzees treat each other).

A great deal of my research in the bibliography is dedicated to exploring this subject and developing my own theory of how shame came into being, and how that effects gender differences today.

Shame and the Modern University

One of the most obvious places to look for how shame has transformed society in the past four decades is in our institutions of higher learning. A large number of books have been written on the subject of how power works on university campuses. Cultural changes tend to move from campus to other areas of social life, such as the workplace and politics. For those reasons, the modern university is an excellent place to start in an inquiry into shame and modern society.