Guilt vs Shame

Guilt: a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc., whether real or imagined.

Shame: the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another.

Shame and guilt have much in common: they are self-conscious emotions, implying self-reflection and self-evaluation (e.g., Tangney & Tracy, 2012); they involve negative self-evaluations and feelings of distress elicited by one’s perceived failures or transgressions (e.g., Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007); they strongly correlate with each other (e.g., Ferguson & Crowley, 1997; Harder, 1995), and often coexist (Eisenberg, 2000; Lewis, 1971). However, most researchers maintain that shame and guilt are distinguishable from each other, and that their differences matter. Both shame and guilt are “self-critical” emotions.

Guilt implies a negative moral self-evaluation. A necessary condition for regarding an evaluation as moral is that it should concern someone’s behavior, goals, beliefs or traits for which (s)he is regarded as responsible. The evaluation will be positive or negative depending on the beneficial or harmful quality ascribed to such behavior, goal, and so on. Guilt is indeed concerned with one’s responsibility for a harmful attitude or behavior. By contrast, shame implies a nonmoral negative self-evaluation. Note that “nonmoral” is not synonym to “immoral”. Shame is not focused on responsibility issues. It is rather concerned with a perceived discrepancy between one’s actual and one’s ideal self. However, one may also feel ashamed (rather than guilty) of a responsible fault. Even when a responsible fault is at stake, ashamed people do not focus on responsibility issues, but on the disappointing fact that such fault reveals their defectiveness with regard to their ideal self. According to Rozin et al. (1999, p. 574), both shame and guilt “involve ongoing assessments of the moral worth and fit of the individual self within a community”. Shame is concerned with self-worth. But, first, it is concerned with both moral and nonmoral self-worth; second, when moral self-worth is at stake, what matters to the ashamed person is not his or her responsibility for the fault, but how this fault impacts on his or her ideal self. Shame implies perceived lack of power to meet the standards of one’s ideal self, whereas guilt implies perceived power and willingness to be harmful, that is, to violate the standards of one’s moral self. whereas guilt is likely to motivate either reparative or self-punitive behavior, shame is likely to motivate either withdrawal or increased efforts in building one’s aspired-to identity.

Three possible kinds of fault have been identified: the public versus private experience of the fault; its proscriptive versus prescriptive nature; and the moral versus the both moral and nonmoral nature of the fault.

Public Versus Private According to this distinction, shame is elicited by public faults, and (one’s fear of) others’ negative evaluations, whereas guilt is a private feeling, elicited by one’s own negative self-evaluation (e.g., Benedict, 1946; Combs, Campbell, Jackson, & Smith, 2010; Wallbott & Scherer, 1995). Still, this does not rule out that, when experienced privately, shame might imply either thinking that one’s fault can become public or imagining a judging audience. As often suggested, shame is more likely than guilt to imply a feeling of exposure to a judging audience (e.g., M. Lewis, 1992). According to Kaufman (1996, p. 28), “to feel shame is to feel seen, acutely diminished”—which is also supported by the person’s typical wish to disappear and tendency to hide (e.g., Darwin, 1872/1965; H. B. Lewis, 1971; M. Lewis, 2008). In fact public exposure of one’s faults has been found to be associated more with shame than with guilt (Smith, Webster, Parrott, & Eyre, 2002). However, if one assumes that shame is elicited by (actual, or expected, or imagined) external sanctions, one might draw the inference that this emotion coincides with a mere fear of others’ disapproval, and that it can be experienced without evaluating oneself negatively—which is indeed stated by some authors (e.g., Ausubel, 1955; Calhoun, 2004; Wollheim, 1999).

Proscriptive Versus Prescriptive According to Sheikh and Janoff-Bulman (2010), proscriptive violations (doing something one should not do) would elicit shame, whereas prescriptive violations (not doing something one should do) would elicit guilt.

Moral Faults Versus Both Moral and Nonmoral Faults According to some authors (e.g., Sabini & Silver, 1997; Smith et al., 2002), guilt is elicited by moral transgressions, implying those faults one is held responsible for, whereas shame also includes nonmoral faults, that is, those attributed to flaws of character, incompetence or physical inadequacies for which the person is not held responsible.

The debate on their differences is still open.

Many people who display narcissistic behavior often suffer from profound feelings of shame but have little authentic concern for other people; they don’t tend to feel genuinely guilty. The lack of empathy to be found in narcissistic personality disorder makes real guilt unlikely since guilt depends upon the ability to intuit how someone else might feel.

When shame is especially pervasive, it usually precludes feelings of genuine concern and guilt from developing. In such cases, idealization often comes into play: other people are then viewed as perfect, the lucky ones who have the ideal shame-free life we crave. Shame often operates outside of conscious awareness, making it challenging to identify and overcome. Shame can paralyze people, forming the lens for all self-evaluation. Everyone experiences shame occasionally—but some, unfortunately, are ruled by it. Embarrassment results from trivial social transgressions, where the person may be embarrassed in front of particular people but doesn’t feel that such events involve their entire self. Shame, by contrast, involves the whole self, the core identity.

Shame has various root causes. Sometimes shame is instilled in early childhood by the harsh words or actions of parents or other authority figures, or from bullying by peers. Shame can stem from a person’s own poor choices or harmful behavior.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6143989

Miceli M, Castelfranchi C. Reconsidering the Differences Between Shame and Guilt. Eur J Psychol. 2018 Aug 31;14(3):710-733. doi: 10.5964/ejop.v14i3.1564. PMID: 30263080; PMCID: PMC6143989.

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