Inside Out: Psychology professor publishes study challenging how we view shame

Shame serves as functional mechanism for navigating social world 

(STILLWATER, Okla., March 31, 2026) — Shame is often seen as a harmful emotion — something people would be better off avoiding or overcoming. But new research suggests it might actually serve an important function.

Oklahoma State University’s Dr. Daniel Sznycer, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, collaborated with Dr. Yiftach Argaman, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Greifswald, to study why humans feel shame.

Their research study, “Cross-cultural evidence that shame is a defense against reputational damage,” was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

This research concludes that shame may be a universal, evolved psychological system designed to protect individuals from reputational damage. This emotion is like a built-in warning system that helps protect one’s reputation.

To come to this conclusion, Sznycer, Argaman and collaborators presented evidence from participants in six countries: the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Japan, China and the United States, with the U.S. grouped into two cultural regions: southern states and northern states.

Despite wide cultural differences, the results in all regions showed strikingly similar patterns: shame intensifies when failures pertain to abilities more highly valued by others and when those failures are visible to others.

“These findings suggest that shame is not a cultural artifact or a psychological flaw,” Argaman said. “It is a functional mechanism that helps individuals navigate the social world by minimizing the likelihood and costs of being devalued by others.”

The research tested two key predictions.

First, people feel more shame after failures in abilities more highly valued by others, such as lacking intelligence or communicative abilities, than after lesser failures, such as drawing or recognizing colors.

Second, shame is more intense when failures are public rather than private. Across all eight regions studied, both predictions were strongly supported.

In other words, shame appears to be finely tuned to the level of social threat. When the risk of reputational harm increases, so does the intensity of shame.

According to a popular theory, shame is an ugly and maladaptive emotion. Correspondingly, many interventions aim to reduce or eliminate shame. But the researchers draw an analogy to physical pain: unpleasant, yet essential for survival.

“Physical pain protects the body from tissue damage; similarly, shame protects the individual from reputational damage,” Sznycer said.

The findings suggest that efforts to eliminate shame may be misguided. Instead, understanding its function could lead to better approaches in psychology, education and mental health.

Top 5 things to know about the emotion: Shame

1. Shame may actually help protect your reputation
   1. While shame feels bad, the experiments suggest it actually helps the individual. It helps you minimize the likelihood and costs of being devalued by others. We found that shame operates like an internal warning system, estimating just how much a given failure would harm your standing in others’ eyes. When the potential reputational hit is large, shame intensifies, nudging you away from reputationally damaging behavior. In this way, shame guides people toward decisions that yield benefits while minimizing reputational costs.
2. The more serious the mistake, the more shame people feel
   1. The experiments indicate that people experience stronger feelings of shame when they imagine failing at abilities more highly valued by others — like communicating — compared to less valued abilities such as drawing. This shows that shame isn’t random. Instead, it is finely tuned to how much a situation could lower your reputational value in the eyes of others.
3. Shame increases when others can see your mistakes
   1. People reported feeling more shame when their actions were public rather than private. That’s because reputation depends on what others know. When people can see your failings (vs. when they cannot), the potential for reputational damage is greater, so shame becomes more intense
4. This pattern is the same across cultures
   1. We studied participants from multiple countries: the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Japan, and China. According to an influential theory, culture shapes emotion, and so shame will vary radically across cultures. But that’s not what we found. Across all the countries we studied, people responded in nearly identical ways: feeling more shame for bigger and more visible failures. This suggests that shame is not just shaped by culture but may be a universal part of human nature.
5. Shame isn’t just a “bad” emotion, it has a function
   1. Although shame can feel painful, the findings suggest it has a function. Physical pain is unpleasant — but the real problem is tissue damage due to injury or infection, and pain helps protect you from making it worse. Shame works in a similar way. The real threat is social devaluation — losing others’ respect, trust or support — and shame is the signal that helps you avoid or limit that damage.

About the Author: Dr. Daniel Sznycer is an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. As a social psychologist, he uses theories of selection pressures and data from ancestral and modern humans to produce computation-level descriptions of our social psychology. His research focus is on emotion, value, and morality and institutions.

 

Oklahoma State University is a modern land-grant university that prepares students for success. OSU has more than 36,000 students across its five-campus system and more than 27,000 on its combined Stillwater and Tulsa campuses, with students from all 50 states and more than 127 nations. Established in 1890, OSU has graduated more than 300,000 students to serve the state of Oklahoma, the nation and the world.