Kim Mills: All of us have no doubt felt the sting of guilt or shame, that uncomfortable sinking feeling when you know that you’ve done something wrong and the world is judging you for it—or maybe you’re judging yourself. But although the words guilt and shame are sometimes used interchangeably, they’re two distinct emotions that manifest differently and affect us in different ways.
So what is the difference between shame and guilt? What role do these emotions play in our mental health? Are they useful tools of persuasion? Does trying to guilt or shame someone into changing their behavior usually work? How early in life do these emotions appear? When do children start to feel guilt and shame? Are some people more shame prone or guilt prone than others? And how does that affect their lives and choices? If guilt or shame is eating away at you, what can you do to address it? What if you feel guilty over something that isn’t your fault or something that you can’t change? What can you do then?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. June Tangney, a distinguished university professor in the psychology department at George Mason University. She has spent her career studying how shame and guilt develop and how these emotions affect us. Dr. Tangney is an APA fellow and has authored or edited several books and published dozens of journal articles on shame, guilt, and other moral emotions. Her latest research focuses on shame and guilt in current and formerly incarcerated populations, and on developing interventions to help the 11 million people who cycle through U.S. jails each year.
Dr. Tangney, thank you for joining me today.
June Tangney, PhD: Thank you. It’s a delight to be here.
Mills: Let’s start with the most basic question. What is the difference between shame and guilt? How do these emotions differ from each other?
Tangney: In a nutshell, when we feel shame, we feel bad about ourselves. We are fundamentally flawed because we did something. It reflects on who we are as a person. I’m a bad person for having done that. Guilt in contrast focuses on a behavior somewhat separate from the self. You can be a good person, but do a bad thing. And so when people feel guilt, they feel, typically, bad about something that they’ve done, something specific, or not done that they should have done
Mills: And are guilt and shame useful tools of persuasion? Can you guilt or shame someone into changing their behavior?
Tangney: That’s such an interesting question. And oddly, the interpersonal aspects of shame and guilt have been studied much less than some of the other issues that you brought up. Such as is it healthy to feel a good amount of shame or a good amount of guilt? When is it problematic for the person? I think the next generation is going to look much more at much shame and guilt as attempts to persuade or control other people. And there’s surprisingly little research on that.
Mills: So how do guilt and shame affect people’s mental health? Are people who are prone to feeling shame more susceptible to some mental health disorders?
Tangney: Yes, actually, Freud was wrong on one point. It turns out—
Mills: Only one?
Tangney: Well, he’s quoted as saying guilt is the cause of neurosis. And actually it seems to be more shame, that people who are prone to feeling bad about themselves because they failed or transgressed, people who are prone to shame about the self, are more susceptible to a range of different psychological and behavioral problems. That doesn’t mean if you’re shame prone that you are condemned to a life of misery. I didn’t get into this just randomly. My—I’m shame prone. One of my daughters is shame prone. The correlation is there are people who are shame prone who can manage it, and part of it is sort of resilience and managing it.
Mills: And are there techniques, I mean, do you work with people and try to help them understand if you behave in a certain way, you can feel less shame, you can feel less guilt?
Tangney: Yeah, I think just actually telling people about, educating them about the difference between shame and guilt—that typically when we feel shame, it’s kind of out of proportion. I may have hurt my friend’s feelings and been thoughtless, but that doesn’t mean I’m a terrible friend necessarily. And I think if you present people with the difference between two, there’s often this aha sort of experience that people describe where, “oh, you mean I don’t have to feel really bad.” The shame thing about me as a person, I could feel guilt.
And one of the big differences between shame and guilt, it has to do with what people are then motivated to do. And it turns out that we all fail and transgress at certain times. Times when people feel shame about their failures or transgressions, they’re inclined to become defensive, to deny, to blame other people, to not really take responsibility and sometimes to get angry at other people for making them feel that way. But what they don’t necessarily do is change their behavior. They don’t own it, because it’s so painful to think “I’m a horrible person” and own that. When people feel guilt about something they’ve really done and just focus on, I feel bad that I did that, then they’re more inclined to—well, first of all, a behavior’s easier to change than a self. People are pressed not to hide and escape and deny. When people feel guilt about specific behavior, they’re inclined to want to confess, apologize, make things right.
Mills: So let me ask you a developmental question. At what age in life do guilt and shame begin to emerge? And do they emerge at the same time or different times?
Tangney: I would have to turn to my expert developmental psychologists. I’ve given this a lot of thought and delved through the literature and my understanding of the development of the self really, and what’s required to feel guilt about a behavior without feeling shame about the self is the ability to distinguish between what I do and who I am. I don’t think that’s something that very, very young children are able to do. I think that doesn’t really emerge much before age seven or eight. It depends on the child, but clearly children feel shame well before that—there’s embarrassment, there’s shame within the first two years of life.
Mills: If guilt or shame is really interfering with your life, it’s not just an occasional reaction to a particular incident, but something that you feel frequently, what can you do to address that and where might that be coming from?
Tangney: Well, people get stuck for a lot of different reasons. And I think that therapy can be very helpful. Also confiding and working with a good friend who maybe is kinder to you than you are to yourself. But I think really recognizing the difference between ‘I did a bad thing and therefore I’m a bad person’ and that’s the take home point as opposed to ‘I did a bad thing, now what can I do about it?’
Mills: I was going to say, what about guilt over things that aren’t your fault or out of your control, like the kind of guilt that people feel when they survive a tragedy unscathed and a lot of other people are hurt?
Tangney: I’ve been giving that a lot of thought recently. I think partly because of the COVID pandemic and such. My measure, I have a measure of individual differences in proneness to shame and guilt. How much people are prone to guilt, how much people are prone to shame in general. And almost all of the items, the situations refer to events where the person really did do something. I hurt somebody’s feelings, broke something, told a lie. What I didn’t include is feeling guilty about things that you didn’t do that aren’t your responsibility. And that’s another huge swath of—is it justified guilt? And I think the pandemic is a great example that for a long time we just didn’t know. I mean, we may have passed along a terrible illness to a loved one without knowing that we had it or knowing how it was transmitted at some point. And yet we often feel guilty, I think, or many people do, for things that they couldn’t have anticipated, they couldn’t have known.
And I think that’s where really doing some careful rethinking with a good friend, a therapist, a counselor, a wise loved one to really look at it and say, well, could you have foreseen this? Did you really know? And I think along with that comes this idea that there’s a zero sum game, that that’s how life is. That if I survived and somebody else, I took something away from them. That’s not how the world works. But we do have this sense that if I’m doing well, somebody else must be doing poorly, that there’s only so much to go around. And that’s generally not the case. The more we cooperate, for example, the better off we all are.
Mills: There are so-called negative emotions that have some positive or evolutionary reason for existence. Is there anything that’s beneficial about guilt or shame? Do they help motivate people to do better to become better people?
Tangney: I haven’t seen much evidence of shame having that effect or being shame prone about day-to-day transgressions. I wonder, and I don’t know yet, but I have a hunch that there are pivotal points, maybe one or two or three in a person’s life, where they do something that really is over the top against their beliefs and feel shame and maybe use that to sort of like, oh boy, maybe I better recalibrate and rethink things here. But certainly that’s not something on a day-to-day basis that we need or should be doing.
I did read a paper and I wish I could remember the name of the authors, but it changed my whole thinking about shame. A 2022 article, just recently came out. So my whole story has been in a nutshell, guilt is good, shame is bad. Well, of course it’s not that simple. I’m delighted to see the next generation expanding and looking in a much more nuanced way at these emotions.
But this paper, what it did show is that there’s something about observing someone else being shamed that is the key. I used to think that shame was around because it was useful back in preverbal days. And for a variety of reasons, it was adaptive to shame people who were not able to keep up with the herd or whatever. But we’re not there now. And so I used to think it was just a vestige of earlier times in human development, but now this paper suggests that if you and I are having an exchange, and let’s say that you go water your lawn during a drought and I call you out on it publicly, well, you’re not likely to change that behavior. You’re likely to get defensive and “what’s your deal with telling me what to do” and all like that. But other people watching us who see me shaming you are less likely themselves to go water their lawn. I mean, that wasn’t the exact thing that they studied, but that was the basic idea, is seeing others shamed is powerful.
Mills: So it serves a purpose. Yeah.
Tangney: Yes. And I thought that was just so interesting.
Mills: Are guilt and shame universal or are there people who never experience one or the other?
Tangney: That’s a really interesting question. Michael Lewis, who is one of the pioneers in research on shame and guilt, he had the notion, he talked about some people are guilt blind, they just can’t acknowledge or grapple with a human failure, a human sin, a human transgression and just feel guilt. They automatically slide right into shame. And that is really problematic in a lot of ways. Right? In my work with people involved in the criminal justice system, I’ve worked mostly with people charged with felonies and really the full range. We’ve also assessed and studied psychopathy, and that’s a relatively small percentage of people who are incarcerated. Only about 19% of those, 19% who reach criteria or threshold for being considered having psychopathy. They do feel shame. It’s easy to feel dissed and humiliated and shamed, not about the things that you and I might feel shamed about, but shames that they got caught, whatever. Guilt, not so much. That seems to be kind of missing in some people, really being able to own a behavior and say, I did it.
Mills: Are there other disorders that are associated with an inability to feel guilt? I’m thinking for example, borderline personality disorder where people tend not to feel like anything’s their fault. Everybody else is aligned against them.
Tangney: It’s a very, very complicated, I mean, shame proneness is related to—people with borderline personality disorder tend to be high in shame.
Mills: But guilt?
Tangney: Not so much. I’d have to go back and look at the data. I mean, here’s the thing. If you feel both shame and guilt, or if something is correlated with both shame and guilt kind, shame kind of takes over the whole picture. What really matters is can you feel guilt about a behavior, own it and not get into this, what really is a very selfish self-focused emotion? “Me, me, me, I’m such a horrible person.” As opposed to, “I did a bad thing and I think that hurt your feelings.”
And it turns out that when people feel guilt about a specific behavior, they’re more likely to feel empathy for the person that they hurt. If they feel shame about the same event, they’re more likely, they’re not so concerned about, “gee, I hurt your feelings and I feel empathy for you.” They have interpersonal concerns, but it’s more like, “what are you thinking of me? Are you thinking that I’m such a horrible person too?”
Mills: Now, I understand that there is a connection between being prone to shame and prone to anxiety. Can you talk about that, how that has arisen in people?
Tangney: Well, it’s not just anxiety. So we find that proneness to shame is associated with a whole range of internalizing and externalizing problems. So shame is associated with anxiety and depression. In some people it’s associated with aggression and anger and ineffective ways of managing anger. For some people, for some people both it’s been linked to eating disorders, it’s been linked to—so I think we don’t know why some people are more susceptible to one kind of disorder as opposed to another. I think being shame prone doesn’t necessarily put you on track to experience certain kinds of symptoms, but it is an attack on the self that is painful and that serves to essentially disorganize the self and make it less effective, more difficult to maintain a good sense of self-esteem and self-confidence.
Mills: What about sex and age differences when it comes to shame? What have you found there?
Tangney: That’s interesting. Females of all ages—whether you look at children or adolescents or college students or parents or grandparents or whatever—women, girls score higher than men or boys on both shame and guilt. But women score higher on pretty much all kinds of emotions except anger, which is about equivalent.
So there becomes the never-ending question of, is it that women have more access to emotion, experience more emotions more intensely, or are we just better socialized to recognize, acknowledge and feel comfortable sharing that? It’s just hard to know. But what we have found is although women may be more prone to shame than men, girls more than boys, the relationship of shame proneness to aggression or depression or what have you, is about the same for men and women. So if you’re a woman who experiences a lot more shame than the average woman, you’re going to be just as susceptible as a man who experiences maybe a little less shame, but more than the average man, is what it comes down to.
Mills: So how did you get interested in studying these topics? I understand that the time that you began to delve into it, you were pretty much out there by yourself.
Tangney: Well, I was warned not to do this, a well-intentioned senior mentors and like that, although I have to say Sy Feshbach, my graduate advisor, we did some work on television and children. And after I graduated, I was graduating and I said, “Sy, I’m really not that interested in this.” And I’m sure he had hoped that I would continue in that area. I said, “I’m interested in the shame and guilt stuff. I know it’s kind of flaky and everybody’s telling me it’s flaky.” And he’s like, “go for it. Just go for it.” And I’m so grateful for that. I was really very much influenced by Helen Block Lewis, who wrote a book in 1971 that laid out this distinction between shame and guilt that seems to be well supported now. And I was also very, very much influenced by Norma Feshbach, who made a career out of articulating theoretically what empathy is and then coming up with a measure. And for me, I saw her make a wonderful career that way and thought, whoa, shame and guilt. Now there’s an interesting one. I did mention that I was raised Catholic, so it kind of made a joke about that. But I want to, so everybody always asks me—you haven’t yet—about religion.
Mills: That was my next question.
Tangney: So I just assumed because I was Catholic, that’s how I got into this. And I can tell you a little bit about what my thoughts were on this back when I was six. But it turns out when you actually look at shame proneness and guilt proneness for people who are Jewish versus Catholic versus some other kind of Christian versus Hindu versus atheist versus agnostic, there’s just almost no difference at all. It’s amazing. It’s like something that should be there that’s not, and we’ve looked at current religious affiliation, and we’ve also looked at religious affiliation as a child because sometimes people change their religions and religious beliefs in adulthood. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s got a corner on shame or guilt, and we’re all susceptible for better or worse. And I think the big thing is to figure out ways to make the most of these negative emotions and be able to resolve them in constructive ways and then move on.
Mills: Well, I will confess that I too was raised Roman Catholic, and I have always had the—I’ve had the sense that shame and guilt were tools to get you to toe the religious line. It was a way of controlling people. If you felt shame or guilt around the things that the church told you, you should feel shameful and guilty about. You would be a better member of the church. I mean, the fact that you had to go to confession. I mean, when I was a kid, they wanted you to confess your sins every Saturday night. It was dreadful.
Tangney: And God forbid you should forget one, because that’s not going to be forgiven.
Mills: God knows.
Tangney: Right? It’s an interesting take on that. The message I got actually was, and this really disturbed me a lot, was I grew up in Buffalo. I don’t know if the Roman Catholic churches are more graphic there than other places, but as a child, I was surrounded by these, the stations of the cross that were very, very gory for a child. And the emphasis was on how much suffering Jesus did for us, worthless people. And of course, I’m going to sin, right? I knew by age four I wasn’t going to be a saint. The message I got was, the better the person you are, the worse you should feel. Well, that’s really troubling. I should feel really bad and that’ll make me a good person. Where does that get us? So that was my conundrum. It’s interesting.
Mills: It would seem to me that at least it’s being better understood that that’s not necessarily the best motivator in the world. I mean, my sense today is that, for example, when you go to your physician, your primary care physician, that you’re not shamed into, oh, you weigh too much. If you don’t deal with your weight, you’re going to die. Instead, they look at your weight and then they talk generally about how you’re doing. Are you getting that sense as well that there is an understanding that shaming people into changing their behavior is not effective?
Tangney: Yes, and I think one place where that has been just a tremendous shift is in treatment of substance abuse disorders. So it used to be the interventions that were truly shaming events where everybody gets together and dumps on the person with the substance abuse problem nowadays. Well, we have just a much more kind and gentle way of approaching that that does not involve shame, but support and love.
Mills: What’s the relationship between shame and embarrassment?
Tangney: Oh, yes. That’s so interesting. I think many people think of embarrassment as kind of a less intense, milder version of shame. It turns out that embarrassment and shame are really quite different. First of all, people can feel ashamed when they’re alone. They most often feel shamed in social situations or about social events, but people almost never feel embarrassed when they’re by themselves. I mean, you can do whatever you want in your living room as long as your blinds are drawn, right? And then when people feel embarrassed, there’s kind something a little funny and amusing about it. The embarrassment look—I know we’re doing a podcast, but it looks a little like you’re kind of looking down, but you’re sort of looking up and there’s a little smile—and there’s nothing funny about shame at all. It’s not funny. It hurts. And if you can bring some levity and some humor to it in a way that’s supportive, that’s a wonderful thing to do for a partner or a loved one.
Mills: Now, I know that a lot of the work you’re doing now involves interventions to help people in the criminal justice system. How can our knowledge and understanding of shame and guilt be leveraged to help people who are in that system?
Tangney: I’m not sure that that is the most important direction at this point. I mean, that’s originally how I got involved in doing research with this population was thinking that we could leverage shame and guilt and such. The biggest predictor of changing one’s behavior and not recidivating, of not being re-incarcerated, is not misusing substances. That’s one really big thing. The other biggest predictor is self-control. And so that does some interesting angles of how to help people increase a sense of self-control in areas that are important to them, and especially around substance abuse. I think substance abuse is a funny area because nobody really owns it. Clinical psychology is like, this isn’t our thing. We don’t do this. And yeah, social workers are kind of like, well, that’s not really our thing. And it just sort of, nobody really quite has owned it.
Mills: Perhaps because it’s so difficult.
Tangney: There’s a lot of hope and many different humane approaches, much more so than interventions. The shame fests and—some work for others and some work for some for others.
Mills: So just to wrap up, I like to ask researchers what else they’re working on. What’s your next big project?
Tangney: I’m not really quite sure. I’m at a crossroads right now. It’s difficult right now with COVID still in the background to do the kind of research we were doing in the jails, in prisons, having people from outside coming in. I mean, it’s made it a difficult situation, even more difficult. Right now, I’m really focused on seeing the last of my graduate students get where they want to go, and then thinking about next steps. I think maybe stepping back and looking at clinical psychology more broadly, what it offers, when it’s helpful and when it’s not, and what non-specialists can expect and what’s okay and what’s not.
Mills: Well, I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.
Tangney: Thank you. I have really enjoyed it. And I want to thank APA for all their support of science and the marriage of clinical work and science.
Mills: We will keep that up. Thanks. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for a future podcast, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
June Tangney, PhD, is a university professor and professor of psychology at George Mason University. She studies the moral emotions of shame, guilt and empathy. She is coauthor (with Rhonda Dearing) of the book Shame and Guilt and coeditor (with Rhonda Dearing) of Shame in the Therapy Hour. Her research on the development and implications of moral emotions has been funded by NIDA, NICHD, NSF, and the John Templeton Foundation. Currently, her work focuses on moral emotions among incarcerated offenders and developing novel interventions that leverage inmates’ moral emotions and prosocial values.
