Terry Prone: What a shame to get your kicks out of righteous indignation

Shaming others moved from the public square to online — it now happens so frequently that 'trending' can be a synonym for 'shaming'

JK Rowling was one extremely tall poppy/ high achiever. Her gender won’t have helped, either: women suffer online shaming more than men.

SHAMING isn’t new. It’s not even recent in origin. It can be traced back to leprosy in Biblical times. Having to carry a bell to warn off the uninfected was in itself a tool of shame. The bell-ringer was, as their cry affirmed, “Unclean, unclean”. 

The frisson of terror the healthy experienced at the sound of the bell has to have been accompanied by a strand of self-satisfaction.

Humans instinctively blame the unfortunate for what has happened them, the flip side of that blame being an enhanced sense of self-worth and — crucially — of belonging to the good guys. 

Stigmatising is a two-way system of punishment and reward.

That sense of being on the right side of the moral argument led to public blame becoming an entertainment event in the Middle Ages.

Not, perhaps, as much fun as attending the Electric Picnic, but shaming the bad guys in the public square undoubtedly had its satisfactions. Nothing like it on an otherwise boring summer evening — as evidenced by depictions from the time. 

Just to take one example, the Coutumes de Toulouse illustrated manuscript from the 13th century shows three people, one of them clearly a wrong-doer, since that person is raised up in an imprisoning machine called the stocks.

The one in the stocks could be any gender but looks like a girl with some kind of headdress on. Her hands are raised in helpless self-defence because she knows what’s coming.

The problem is that she doesn’t seem to have copped on as to where it’s coming from — she’s looking away from the second figure, who carries a basket of what looks like spuds and has one potato lined up overhead, ready to chuck at the prisoner.

The potato-carrier has a lower lip on him (we think it’s a him) that’s filled with gloating satisfaction and his hair is flying, such is the vigour of his throw.

The guy behind him seems more ambivalent, and for some reason that isn’t immediately clear, is carrying a trumpet. Quite what he’s about to do with the musical instrument is anyone’s guess. Maybe provide cheery music to encourage the missile-throwers?

The stocks in the middle of the town square were where a miscreant could be incarcerated and put on display as a human moral lesson: “Do the bad thing I did, and you’ll end up here, as sure as eggs is eggs.” (Eggs being another favourite weapon of the virtuous.)

Once someone was in the stocks, it was open season. Anyone with a tomato past its best could throw it at the unfortunate as a way of demonstrating their condemnation of whatever evil deed the prisoner had committed.

Or as a demonstration of contempt for the prisoner himself or herself. It was an exercise in vegetable shaming, clothed in the assumption that the prisoner deserved it.

The guys like the one with the thick lip didn’t leave much in the way of records as to why they got into the tomato-chucking business, but it’s fair to assume that “Serves you right, SPLAT!” was as close as they came to a rationale.

Massive societal change in the 20th century, particularly .in the latter half, made public shaming die down a bit. Nobody had a letter burned on to their face any longer.

After the Holocaust, the very notion of a device like a yellow Star of David affixed to clothing was abhorrent. We were all more compassionate, more tolerant, more inclusive. 

Blood sports moved online

Or so we believed, for a brief period of self-congratulatory delusion before shaming became, as defined by Monica Lewinsky, a blood sport all over again.

That blood sport didn’t happen in the public square or using over-ripe produce. Shaming others moved on to the internet, with a few important differences, one of which is that it’s possible to do it anonymously and to easily stimulate the participation of hundreds or thousands of other anonymous attackers.

It now happens so frequently that “trending” can be a synonym for “shaming”.

A new examination of the ways in which public online shaming happens suggests two main pathways:

1) A justice motive whereby shaming is associated with participants’ concerns — with restoring justice, perceptions of deservingness, and moral outrage

2) A hedonic motive, whereby justice concerns increase participants’ perceptions that an offender is deserving of consequences.

The first of these would suggest that what brings an individual to the point of shaming someone else online is the desire to restore what is right and proper.

The person calling out another individual (often a complete stranger to the first person) wants to right a wrong, perhaps by correcting the behaviour or attitudes of the second person.

They don’t get anything personal out of it — they just want to publicly state the right way to do things and fix it when someone won’t obey the rules of society.

It’s not that the shamer has been personally wounded in any way, but rather that they’re experiencing moral outrage. They want to define what’s right and what’s wrong and nail the person who has done wrong.

Knocking a high-achiever

The classic example is JK Rowling, whose inputs on transgender issues led to recurring social media pile-ons, to which an undoubted contributor is her fame.

Research back in 2002 revealed that people enjoyed someone else’s downfall (schadenfreude) more when the person falling down was a high achiever.

This is sometimes called “tall poppy syndrome”. Rowling was one extremely tall poppy/ high achiever. Her gender won’t have helped, either: women suffer online shaming more than men.

Sometimes, the process starts with comments on the issue, rather than the behaviours which have caused it. Hence, what could be called the benign phase of online observation includes reactions like “OMG” or “This is so sad”.

The next step is where the behaviour is the target: “Disgusting” or “What a terrible thing to do”. When the shaming becomes personal, the individual being shamed is portrayed as evil or stupid. During the pandemic, this led to shamers creating the new term “covidiot”.

More research is needed to work out at what point the desire to correct and to take a moral stance morphs into simple malicious pleasure at the misfortune of another.

Interestingly, the most recent data suggests that anonymity may not be as important a factor in motivating online abusers as had been thought.

Once a pile-on begins, it would seem that the sense of collegiality — the sense of being in righteous company — adds greatly to the “hedonic" motive.

The attacker believes the person in the electronic stocks deserves to be there and — an important reinforcement of this — that all right-thinking humans agree.

The researchers ruefully note “these results provide some initial evidence that ‘feeling good’ at the suffering of others may play a relatively more prominent role in online shaming than ‘doing good’.” 

It isn’t just that the righteous are bold. The righteous also get a hell of a kick out of punishing others.