On the blaming, shaming, guilting game
There are about twenty-five children in a classroom. At the end of the year, one of them gets the prize.
We have agreed to call this normal. We have agreed, without ever really discussing it, that the correct way to teach twenty-five human beings is to rank them against each other and hand something to the one at the top. Which means that in every classroom, in every year, in every country I have lived in, twenty-four children learn something that was never on the curriculum.
They learn they are not good enough.
And then we do the second thing, which is stranger still. We send children to school because they do not yet know. That is the entire premise. They arrive not knowing, and we are meant to walk them from not-knowing to knowing. And then, for the whole of that walk, we correct them, mark them down, compare them, and make them feel small for the exact thing we invited them there to fix.
We punish them for not knowing yet.
I would like to ask a simple question about this. How is that supposed to produce an adult who wants to learn for the rest of their life?
What the ranking actually installs
There is a body of research on this that has been sitting in plain sight for fifty years, and almost none of it has made it into how we actually run schools.
The first finding is about rewards. When you reward a child for doing something in a way the child experiences as controlling — do this, and you will get the star — you reliably reduce their interest in the thing itself. The effect has been replicated so many times it has its own name, the overjustification effect, and what makes it worse is that it is stronger in children than in adults. Grown students can absorb an incentive and keep their appetite. Children mostly cannot. Even praise, delivered in a controlling tone, does it. They are still assembling a sense of who they are, and they read our approval as an instruction rather than as information.
The second finding is about ranking.
It is called the big-fish-little-pond effect. Across a meta-analysis of more than a million students, the average achievement of a child’s class has a negative effect on that child’s sense of their own ability — independent of what the child can actually do. Put a competent child in a room of very competent children and their belief in themselves goes down. The same child, same skills, in a different room, believes more.
So a child’s sense of their own capacity is not built from their capacity. It is built from their position.
And it does not stay in the classroom. The effect has been shown to still predict how people evaluate themselves two to four years after they have left school entirely. The room is gone. The ranking is not.
Two ways to carry “not enough”
What we hand a child in that system is not a grade. It is a sentence, in both senses of the word: you are not smart enough, not quick enough, not enough.
And a child cannot argue with that. A child does not have the equipment to say “this is a badly designed measurement system with a sample size of twenty-five”. A child concludes something much simpler. There is something wrong with me.
From there, in my experience, people go one of two ways.
Some try harder. They become very, very good at things. They collect the qualifications, the promotions, the titles, the salary that would have astonished their parents. And none of it works — not for a day. Because the feeling was never about competence in the first place, so competence cannot touch it. They just keep raising the bar to stay one step ahead of a verdict that was passed on them at age seven.
The others do something that looks like the opposite and comes from exactly the same place. They stop reaching. They find the level at which they will not be humiliated, and they stay there. They call themselves realistic. They are not aiming low because they lack ambition; they are aiming low because aiming high means exposure, and exposure means the verdict gets confirmed in public. Freeze is not the absence of a response. Freeze is a response.
I know the first path from the inside.
I spent more than twenty years as a consultant in large delivery teams, implementing systems for organisations that were considerably more confident about themselves than I was. I was good at it. I was, in fact, exactly as good at it as everyone kept telling me. And each time I moved up, I did not feel proud — I felt found out. Every promotion arrived as evidence that the gap between what they saw and what I was had just got wider, and that I would now have further to fall when it closed.
Nothing on the outside can fix a feeling that was installed on the inside. I know this because I ran the experiment properly, over two decades. When you outsource your sense of self-worth, every even mildly negative feedback will send you spinning for days.
It all ended in burnout, depression, my life fell apart. And in the evenings, wine and beer and cigarettes, the way people drink when they need something to take the edge off a weight they cannot name and would be ashamed to describe. If you had asked me then, I would have said I was tired. I was not just tired. I was carrying something, and I had no language for it, and alcohol is very good at making a thing you have no language for temporarily liveable. I often think alcohol saved my life in those days.
Capitalism, incidentally, has no complaint about the first path. A workforce of people who cannot stop proving themselves is an extremely efficient arrangement. Nobody has to motivate them. They were motivated in year four. And you see the symptoms: what do consultants do with their evenings while on a business trip? They work and drink and smoke way too much, while their family life and health are slowly falling apart.
Addiction – a failure of character?
Here is where it gets interesting, when it comes to the blaming, shaming, guilting game.
The popular version says: we used to think addiction was a moral failure, and now we know it is a disease. Clean, tidy, progressive.
But the evidence is messier than that. Reviewers looking at whether the brain-disease model actually reduced stigma have found that public acceptance of it is largely lip service, and that explaining human difficulty in purely biological terms has often made stigma worse rather than better. Tell people that something is a disease and a good number of them will simply relocate their contempt.
The real shift — the one that is actually happening, the one Gabor Maté has spent his career on — is not from failure to illness. It is from failure to adaptation.
Not: what is wrong with you. But: what happened to you, and what did this behaviour once solve?
In the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which followed more than seventeen thousand ordinary insured adults, a childhood adversity score of six was associated with a forty-six-fold increase in lifetime risk of injecting drugs. Not forty-six per cent. Forty-six times. When the researchers ran the analysis the other way and asked how much injection drug use in that population could be attributed to childhood adversity, the answer was sixty-seven per cent overall, and seventy-eight per cent among women.
And Vincent Felitti, who led the study, wrote something in his conclusion that I think about constantly. He said the major factor underlying addiction is childhood adversity that never healed — and that is concealed from awareness by shame, secrecy, and social taboo.
Read that again. Shame is not a side effect of the problem. Shame is the lid that keeps it in place.
People do not self-medicate because they are weak. They self-medicate because they are carrying something, and because at some point they found something that made it lighter for an hour.
Other things we still call failure of character
If that is true of addiction, then I do not see how it stops there. And I think within a decade or two we will look at procrastination, at “laziness”, at eating that has nothing to do with hunger, the same way.
Nobody wants to be lazy. I have never in my life met a person who woke up and thought: “today I will deliberately underachieve at my own existence and feel terrible about it”. What I have met is a great many people who cannot generate the energy — physical, mental, emotional — to face a task that overwhelms them, and who have been told their whole lives that this is a defect of will.
The research already points this way. Procrastination, as Tim Pychyl puts it, is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem. You are not failing to schedule. You are avoiding a feeling that the task reliably produces, and buying yourself an hour of relief at the expense of a self who exists tomorrow.
And now the finding that I would put on the wall of every school and every prison in Europe:
Students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before one exam procrastinated less before the next one. The effect ran through a measurable reduction in negative feeling.
Shame does not correct the behaviour. Shame is the fuel of the behaviour. We have been treating the disease with the pathogen, for centuries, and calling it discipline.
The weight you cannot put down
There is a physical layer to this that I think is badly underappreciated.
Martin Picard, Robert-Paul Juster and the late Bruce McEwen proposed something they called mitochondrial allostatic load. The idea is this. Your mitochondria are where energy actually gets made. Chronic stress does not only exist in your thoughts; it makes continuous metabolic demands, and those demands, sustained over years, appear to damage the very machinery that produces your energy — with chronically elevated glucose damaging mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA, generating products that drive inflammation and accelerate cellular ageing. The researchers themselves say clearly that the prospective human studies needed to nail this down have not yet been done.
If this is even approximately right, then holding trauma is not a metaphor. It is a standing withdrawal from an energy account, taken every day, before you have done anything. You are carrying something heavy and invisible up every set of stairs, and then being asked why you are out of breath, and then being told that other people manage.
And on top of that we are feeding people fuel that makes the problem worse. A high-glycaemic diet has been associated with increased odds of developing depression in large cohort data — modestly, but consistently. In controlled feeding studies, people on a low-glycaemic-load diet report significantly more vigour and significantly less fatigue than the same people on a high-glycaemic-load diet. Refined carbohydrate spikes you and then drops you, several times a day, for decades.
So: an unhealed nervous system, running on unstable fuel, in a body whose energy production may itself be compromised by the stress it has absorbed.
And this is what we call lazy.
Where this ends up
I’m not saying all of this as an excuse for certain behaviours. I am saying this as a cry for compassion, towards a possibility of healing.
Among incarcerated men, forty-six per cent report four or more adverse childhood experiences. Among men in the general population, nine per cent do. Among incarcerated women, fifty-seven per cent. Among women in general, fifteen per cent. Five times. Nearly four times.
My claim is not that trauma makes people commit crimes — most people carrying heavy childhoods never harm anyone. The claim is narrower and, I think, far more damning:
Our criminal justice system is, in practice, a sorting mechanism for unhealed childhood.
It is where we put the people whose adaptation to suffering happened to inconvenience other people, as opposed to the people whose adaptation to suffering only destroyed themselves quietly, in the evenings, with wine. I was in the second group. It is not a moral distinction. It is a matter of which coping strategy was available in which neighbourhood.
And if you take Maté’s definition of trauma seriously, not the event but the wound the event leaves, and how early it arrived, and whether anyone was there afterwards, then we should consider turning our jails into rehabilitation centres.
The young man
I know of a young man, twenty-one years old, in a European country I will not name.
Over a period of about two months, he sold drugs. Bad drugs. Then he stopped. Not because he was caught, and not because anyone made him. He stopped because he worked out for himself that it was wrong, which is the thing we claim to want and almost never notice when it happens.
A few weeks after he stopped, the police came for him. He was sentenced to three years. His career is gone. Not paused — gone, in the way that only a criminal record can end a life that had not begun yet. He will spend the rest of his life explaining eight weeks of his life to every employer, every landlord, every border. For a foolish thing that a very large number of us did some version of at that age, and got away with.
And here is the part that I find hardest. He believed he was helping people. He was needed, it gave him a feeling of being important. That is not a legal defence and I am not offering it as one. But it tells you something about what was actually going on in him, which is that he was a young man who wanted to be of use and had a badly calibrated map of how. We had a person in front of us who had already corrected his own behaviour, unsupervised, for free, and who wanted to matter to somebody. And we removed him from society for three years, incarcerated him, locked him away, so we don’t need to look at how society has failed him.
The country I live in now, Portugal, has been held up across the world for its drug policy, and rightly — after decriminalising personal possession in 2001, drug deaths fell, HIV infections fell, the number of people imprisoned for drug offences fell, and treatment rates rose. It is genuinely one of the most humane experiments any European state has run.
And even here, selling still sends you to prison. Even the most compassionate drug regime in Europe kept a category of person it was still willing to throw away. It just drew the line somewhere else.
The outrageous part
So let me say the thing plainly.
If we actually believed what the evidence has been telling us for thirty years — that adaptation to unbearable circumstances is what most harmful behaviour is, and that shame reliably makes it worse rather than better — then a prison could not go on being what a prison currently is.
It would have to become a place of repair.
Not a softer prison. Not a prison with better food and a yoga class in the afternoon. A fundamentally different institution, whose stated purpose is that a person leaves it understanding their own impact, having faced the harm they caused, and equipped — actually equipped, not rhetorically — to contribute rather than damage.
And before anyone reaches for the word naive, I would point at the strongest piece of evidence we have. In Norway, researchers exploited the fact that criminal cases are randomly assigned to judges of differing severity — which gives you something very close to a real experiment. They found that imprisonment reduced reoffending by twenty-nine percentage points over five years. But look at who. The entire effect came from people who had not been working beforehand: they entered employment and training programmes inside, and came out with more work and higher earnings. For people who already had jobs, prison did lasting damage.
Which means the prison worked precisely to the degree that it was not functioning as a prison. It worked where it functioned as a rehabilitation centre. Where it functioned as removal, it made things worse.
We have the result. We have had it for years. We simply do not like what it implies about what we have been doing.
What I am not saying
I am not saying nobody is responsible for anything. That is the escape hatch, and I do not want it.
The word blame is doing two entirely different jobs, and we have let them collapse into one. One job is explanation — how did a person arrive here. The other is responsibility — what does this person now owe, and to whom.
Society explains. The person still repairs.
What I am arguing is that our current system delivers neither. It explains nothing, because it never asks. And it repairs nothing, because the person harmed gets no restitution and the person who caused the harm gets no path back. We take three years of a young man’s life, return him to the world less employable and more damaged than we found him, and call the account settled.
That is not accountability. Real accountability would require him to look directly at who was affected and how. It would require him to do something about it. It would require him to stay in the community he harmed rather than be removed from it, which is the more uncomfortable option by a considerable margin. Prison, for all its brutality, lets everyone avoid the actual conversation.
So: any crime is a societal failure and a personal responsibility. The failure is ours — that a child’s adversity went unaddressed for twenty-one years until it became a police matter. The responsibility is his — to understand his impact, and to make mends.
Punishment is the one thing in that sentence doing no work at all.
The question
We built a society on competition, punishment, and negative reinforcement — and we did it at a moment in history when we did not know any better. That is a real defence. For most of the time humans have been organising ourselves, we genuinely did not know.
We know now. We have known for a while.
We know that ranking children installs a verdict that outlasts the classroom. We know that shame does not reduce the behaviour it targets and frequently increases it. We know that most addiction traces back to childhood adversity that nobody attended to. We know that the prisons that work are the ones that stop behaving like prisons.
And we carry on. In the classrooms, in the workplaces, at our own kitchen tables, in the voice inside our own heads at three in the morning — the same game, blaming, shaming, guilting, generation after generation, because it is what was done to us and we have not yet stopped to ask whether it was ever for anything.
So, isn’t it time to reconsider whether we still need the blaming, shaming, guilting game?
Sources
- Deci, Koestner & Ryan (1999, 2001) — meta-analyses on extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation
- Fang et al. (2018), Frontiers in Psychology — big-fish-little-pond effect meta-analysis (N = 1,276,838)
- Marsh et al. (2007) — persistence of the effect after graduation
- Felitti et al. (1998), American Journal of Preventive Medicine — the Adverse Childhood Experiences study
- Felitti (2003), “The Origins of Addiction” — 46-fold figure and population attributable risk
- Heather (2017), Neuroethics — on the brain-disease model and stigma
- Sirois & Pychyl (2013), Social and Personality Psychology Compass — procrastination as emotion regulation
- Wohl, Pychyl & Bennett (2010), Personality and Individual Differences — self-forgiveness reduces future procrastination
- Picard, Juster & McEwen (2014), Nature Reviews Endocrinology — mitochondrial allostatic load
- Gangwisch et al. (2015), American Journal of Clinical Nutrition — glycaemic index and depression risk
- Breymeyer et al. (2016) — mood and energy on high- vs low-glycaemic-load diets
- Washington State DOC survey of 2,100 incarcerated people — ACE prevalence comparison
- Bhuller, Dahl, Løken & Mogstad (2020), Journal of Political Economy — “Incarceration, Recidivism, and Employment”
- Transform Drug Policy Foundation / EMCDDA — outcomes of Portuguese decriminalisation since 2001
