is it more useful to feel shame or guilt?
From reacting to acting.
Imagine a close loved one, 90 years old, living in a care home. Seeing you is the highlight of their month. You promise to visit them on Saturday. You have a busy week; work is tough. You wake up on Sunday, realising you’ve broken your promise. How do you feel?
Ashamed?
Guilty?
Both seem like equally possible reactions. And while they’re similar, your specific reaction might influence your behaviour and the kinds of decisions you're likely to make. Behaviour change is complicated but shame and guilt naturally align with some ideas about how we make change, and in that context, guilt seems more useful for making decisions.
Shame is character focused. It is a feeling about looking inwards and saying ‘I am bad’. Guilt, on the other hand, is outward looking and saying ‘I did something bad’.1 Shame is a mere expression whereas guilt is aimed at action. Shame and guilt are both moral compasses but shame always points in one direction (yourself) and guilt points to where a decision needs to be made.
Shame seems to create a state of being that does not encourage behaviour change. Shame targets the ‘self’ in an abstract manner. There is no clear identifiable course of action for rectifying shame, it is not action-first, it is simply ‘be a better person’. Shame’s tendency towards vague intentions does not lend itself towards creating goals that are measureable and actionable.2
Moreover, shame undermines confidence and causes us to underestimate our own ability to accomplish things. This almost self-evidently makes us less likely to act, as the shamed state captures both emotion (feeling inadequate) and reason (believing we’re incapable). In the absence of those, where does motivation come from?
Guilt does not seem to have these inhibitory functions. It focuses on action. As Martha Nussbaum3 suggests, guilt is implicitly connected to the recognition of the rights of others and how to act to put things right.4 In this sense, it is natural to link to social accountability, which we have evidence for believing is a useful tool for behaviour change. Not wanting to let someone down goes shares the same core essence as the concept of guilt (underpinning the motivating force is the recognition and acceptance that you would feel guilty if you let them down).
Furthermore, forgetting things is a big and underappreciated aspect of why we don’t make a change. Sometimes we just forget to make decisions. This also seems to map the same as above, shame gives abstract intentions that are easy to forget whereas guilt gives specific tasks you can document. Present bias is another, where our long-term objectives are constantly sabotaged by our short-term impulses. Shame focuses on long term character development whereas guilt gives you actions right now. 5
The ability to which we can actually change ourselves to react with guilt instead of shame is an exploration for another day. However, that might not be necessary. The learning here might be that we have the ability to extrapolate out the action-orientation we get from guilt, generating a response mode that is always prioritising good decision-process. That seems more useful than getting caught in vague character development traps.
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavels of Thought.
How To Change by Katy Milkman is the main source of inspiration for this paragraph.