Landers Mitchell, Sznycer Daniel
Center for Early Childhood Research, Department of Psychology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Oklahoma Center for Evolutionary Analysis, Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA.
Evol Hum Sci. 2022 Oct 6;4:e45. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2022.43. eCollection 2022.
The shame system appears to be natural selection's solution to the adaptive problem of information-triggered reputational damage. Over evolutionary time, this problem would have led to a coordinated set of adaptations - the shame system - designed to minimise the spread of negative information about the self and the likelihood and costs of being socially devalued by others. This can account for much of what we know about shame and generate precise predictions. Here, we analyse the behavioural configuration that people adopt stereotypically when ashamed - slumped posture, downward head tilt, gaze avoidance, inhibition of speech - in light of shame's hypothesised function. This behavioural configuration may have differentially favoured its own replication by (a) hampering the transfer of information (e.g. diminishing audiences' tendency to attend to or encode identifying information - shame ) and/or (b) evoking less severe devaluative responses from audiences (shame ). The shame display hypothesis has received considerable attention and empirical support, whereas the shame camouflage hypothesis has to our knowledge not been advanced or tested. We elaborate on this hypothesis and suggest directions for future research on the shame pose.
羞耻系统似乎是自然选择对信息引发的声誉损害这一适应性问题的解决方案。在进化过程中，这个问题会导致一系列协同的适应性变化——即羞耻系统，旨在将关于自身的负面信息传播以及被他人社会贬低的可能性和代价降至最低。这可以解释我们所了解的许多关于羞耻的现象，并产生精确的预测。在此，我们根据羞耻的假设功能，分析人们在感到羞耻时典型地采取的行为姿态——弯腰驼背的姿势、低头、避免目光接触、抑制言语。这种行为姿态可能通过以下方式不同程度地促进自身的复制：(a) 阻碍信息传递（例如减少观众关注或编码识别信息的倾向——羞耻）和/或 (b) 引发观众不那么严厉的贬低反应（羞耻）。羞耻展示假说已受到相当多的关注并得到实证支持，而据我们所知，羞耻伪装假说尚未得到提出或检验。我们详细阐述这一假说，并为羞耻姿态的未来研究提出方向。
