Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame

Abstract

Significance This set of experiments shows that in 15 traditional small-scale societies there is an extraordinarily close correspondence between ( i ) the intensity of shame felt if one exhibited specific acts or traits and ( ii ) the magnitude of devaluation expressed in response to those acts or traits by local audiences, and even foreign audiences. Three important and widely acknowledged sources of cultural variation between communities—geographic proximity, linguistic similarity, and religious similarity—all failed to account for the strength of between-community correlations in the shame–devaluation link. This supplies a parallel line of evidence that shame is a universal system, part of our species’ cooperative biology, rather than a product of cultural evolution.