Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC H3C 3J7, Canada;
Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Sep 25;115(39):9702-9707. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1805016115. Epub 2018 Sep 10.
Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame's match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.
人类觅食者是强制性的群体生活，他们高度依赖互助，这被认为是我们物种社会进化的特征。因此，对于我们的祖先来说，避免损害其他群体成员提供帮助的意愿是一个核心适应问题。从认知上讲，这需要一个预测图，来了解其他人会在多大程度上因为各种可能的行为而贬低个人。有了这样的地图，个体就可以通过预测潜在行为（例如偷窃）会引起多少观众贬值，并将其与行为的直接收益（例如获取）进行权衡，从而避免社交成本高的行为。羞耻系统表现出解决这个适应性问题所需的所有功能特性，其厌恶强度编码了社会成本。之前来自三个西方（化）社会的数据表明，个体在预测各种行为时所产生的羞耻感与观众对这些行为的反应所表达的贬值程度密切相关。在这里，我们报告的数据支持了更广泛的观点，即羞耻是人类生物学的一个基本部分。我们在全球 15 个小规模社区的 899 名参与者中进行了一项实验。尽管语言、文化和生存方式存在广泛差异，但每个社区的羞耻感都与当地观众的贬值密切相关（平均值为+0.84）。即使在如此遥远的社区中也能遇到相同的模式，这表明羞耻感与观众的贬值是一种由选择而不是文化接触或趋同文化进化所产生的设计特征。
