Why some people feel no shame, according to a psychologist

Remorseless is an essential part our species – and works as a social superpower to many.

By Christian Jarrett

Published: Thursday, 06 July 2023 at 12:00 am

Shame is one of the so-called ‘self-conscious emotions’ alongside others such as pride, embarrassment, jealousy and guilt. All these emotions are related to how we think about ourselves – and what we believe others think about us.

People often confuse guilt and shame, or use them interchangeably, but psychologists make a sharp distinction between the two.

Guilt is the uncomfortable feeling you get when you believe you’ve done something wrong.

Shame is the uncomfortable feeling that arises from believing there is something fundamentally bad, broken or wrong with you (perhaps because of something you’ve done, but it could be for other reasons, such as the ways you’ve been mistreated by others).

Why you feel shame

Experiencing a moderate amount of shame from time to time is part of being human and could even have some benefits, despite the discomfort it brings.

To take an evolutionary perspective, psychologists and anthropologists point out that belonging to a group would have been vital to the survival of many of our ancestors, and that shame would have helped them to fit in and play along with a group’s rules and conventions.

To see how this might work, imagine if you acted against the interests of your group (maybe you took more than your fair share of the food or you flirted with the idea of joining a rival group) and you came to feel intense shame for what you’d done – perhaps encouraged by being actively shamed by your group. The feeling of shame would linger and be more powerful than any fleeting sense of guilt.

In fact, the strong emotional discomfort of feeling there was something ‘wrong with you’ might make you highly motivated to make amends, to recommit to the group’s rules to rid yourself of the shameful feelings.

In time, this could lead you to winning back acceptance from the group, thus ultimately increasing your chances of survival.

Not every person feels shame in the same way

But just as we all vary in how prone we are to core emotions such as fear, anger and disgust, we also vary in our shame-proneness. And, in excess, shame-proneness can be debilitating, and it appears to be a feature of several different mental health conditions.

Imagine feeling intense shame following every little mistake you made or following even minor perceived slights from others.

People who experience shame more easily and more of the time, tend to be at increased risk of depression, anxiety (especially social anxiety), OCD, eating disorders, addiction problems and personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, among other conditions.

These associations aren’t too surprising if you consider that shame feels very uncomfortable and that it comes hand in hand with negative thoughts and beliefs, such as expecting to be socially rejected or believing that you’re profoundly broken in some way.

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Acting without remorse may be a sign of psychopathy. Picture credit: Getty

What about the other extreme – being shameless? If the experience of shame contributes to people conforming to social expectations, might people who are shameless experience a more liberated, carefree existence?

Anecdotally, it’s easy to find examples of individuals in the public eye who seem to unashamedly self-promote; to flout social rules in the pursuit of their own agendas.

Some populist political leaders in particular seem quite comfortable lying and cheating their way to success, provoking many media commentators to slam them as ‘shameless’.

Attention-seeking rockstars, disruptive entrepreneurs and provocative artists too might benefit from being blissfully shame-free.

They might commit the kind of misdemeanours, mistakes and outrages that would have most of us crawling to hide behind the nearest rock.

Yet they march on apparently convinced that they’ve done nothing wrong (or if they have, it wasn’t their fault). There’s nothing broken about them, they may think – it’s the rest of us who need sorting out.

All the while, of course, their antics stoke publicity, which they can sometimes use to their benefit.

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Why some people are shameless

While this account is speculative, it would make sense given that some studies have found an association between psychopathy and low shame proneness, and given the growing awareness that there is such a thing as ‘successful psychopaths’.

Psychopathy is one of the so-called ‘dark triad’ traits (alongside narcissism and Machiavellianism). It’s characterised by superficial charm, impulsivity, extreme confidence (and low anxiety) and cold-heartedness. Those last two features in particular could no doubt contribute to a lack of shame.

Successful psychopaths score highly on extreme confidence and cold-heartedness, but they’re not so prone to impulsivity and violent criminality. It’s easy to see how a freedom from shame could also contribute to their success, by giving them the ability to take social risks that sometimes pay off.

Evolutionarily minded psychologists have called this approach to life a ‘cheater strategy’.

As the psychologist Minna Lyons at Liverpool University wrote in the Journal of Psychology, “Psychopathy has been proposed as an evolutionary, genetically influenced cheater strategy consisting of a constellation of skills and deficits that aid in social manipulation”.

Her own findings have demonstrated low shame proneness among high scorers on psychopathy. As she put it, this lack of shame (and guilt) could grant ‘high psychopathy individuals with the capacity to exploit others without feeling remorse’.

In this day and age, when people are frequently subjected to online shaming – sometimes for the mildest alleged transgressions – it can be all the more striking to encounter individuals who are apparently completely unmoved by the risks and discomfort of being shamed.

Indeed, the US researcher Jeremy Sherman, the author of What’s Up With A**Holes? (2021), has argued that there is such a thing as ‘meta-shamelessness’ – as demonstrated by folks who are not only shameless, but who revel in their shamelessness when it’s brought to their attention.

As he puts it, if shamelessness is a ‘liberation’, meta-shamelessness is “… like granting yourself a wildcard and a trump card. You can do anything and whatever you do is right and righteous, unassailable, something to be proud not ashamed of.”

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