Vicarious shame

Abstract

We examined an account of vicarious shame that explains how people can experience a self-conscious emotion for the behaviour of another person. Two divergent processes have been put forward to explain how another's behaviour links to the self. The group-based emotion account explains vicarious shame in terms of an in-group member threatening one's social identity by behaving shamefully. The empathy account explains vicarious shame in terms of empathic perspective taking; people imagine themselves in another's shameful behaviour. In three studies using autobiographical recall and experimental inductions, we revealed that both processes can explain why vicarious shame arises in different situations, what variation can be observed in the experience of vicarious shame, and how all vicarious shame can be related to a threat to the self. Results are integrated in a functional account of shame.

Keywords:

• Vicarious shame
• Group-based shame
• Empathic shame
• Experiential content

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Paulette Flore and Rene Wielenga for their help with the data collection for Study 1, Bertjan Doosje for his helpful comments on Study 2, and Ellen Evers for her help with the programming of Study 2.

Notes

¹A model in which gender was also considered as a predictor revealed no significant interaction effects for gender and the other predictors. A significant main effect of gender was revealed with women scoring higher than men. Only adding the main effect of gender to the model minimally increased the explained variance, R ² _change=.03, p=.029. Adding gender did not change the other results.