PDF Summary:So You've Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson

In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, author Jon Ronson discusses the psychology of humiliation, the use of shame as punishment, and what happens to the targets of public shaming after the crusade is over and everyone forgets about them.

Initially, Ronson thought that public shaming was a force for good. Underdogs and average citizens can hold powerful people and corporations accountable and put enough pressure on them that they’re forced to change for the better. However, as Ronson learned more, he discovered that public shaming can also be a destructive force that ruins people’s lives, even if those people haven’t actually done anything wrong.

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Due to these negative effects, Ronson recommends reflecting before shaming anyone. He no longer shames people unless they’ve victimized someone.

What Motivates Public Shaming?

If public shaming has such potentially dire consequences, why do people participate in it? Scientists and observers have some ideas, but they don’t really know.

What Probably Doesn’t Motivate Public Shamings

One of the most popular theories to explain public shamings is that people lose their minds when part of a crowd and therefore engage in illogical, potentially destructive behaviors (such as shaming). (This is known as contagion, group madness, or deindividuation.) However, the theory has little scientific merit:

• The inventor made it up to get on the good side of the French aristocracy. Gustave LeBon lived through anti-aristocracy uprisings in France and came up with the idea that when people are in a crowd they lose their free will, reasoning power, and restraint—everyone goes mad all at once; there’s no ideological motivation or justification involved. He didn’t do any experiments to prove this; he just wrote a book and people believed it.
• The most famous experiment proving its existence used questionable methodology. In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo turned a Stanford basement into a mock prison and recruited participants for an experiment. After a few days, one of the “guards,” Eshelman, became sadistic and treated the prisoners like animals. However, when Ronson interviewed Eshelman, he hadn’t been violent because he’d lost his mind; he’d decided to act like a prison warden he’d seen in a movie because in the early days, the experiment was going nowhere, and he wanted Zimbardo to get useful results.
• It doesn’t play out in real life. In 2011, some people in the UK rioted and looted for five days after the police shot dead a man named Mark Duggan. If group behavior really is contagious and overpowering, then everyone who encountered the riot, including the police, should have joined in—but, they didn’t. Additionally, if everyone had lost their minds, the riot wouldn’t have spontaneously fizzled out, as it eventually did.

What Might Motivate Public Shamings

Whatever does motivate public shamings, it’s probably more complicated than crowd theory. Crowd psychologist Steve Reicher notes that there are always patterns associated with crowd formation and most people in crowds tend to share an ideology. Public shamers, on the other hand, come from a variety of backgrounds.

Ronson discovered a few factors that might contribute to shamings:

• The desire to do good. Many people who participate in public shamings, like Eshelman, thought they were doing something good.
  • For example, when people shamed Justine Sacco for an insensitive tweet, they thought they were working towards justice by calling out racism.
• Lack of understanding. Ronson found that plenty of people didn’t realize how much public shaming affected the victims and thought the effects were temporary.
  • For example, Sam Biddle, who may have started the pile-up on Justine Sacco, thought people would forget about her eventually and she’d be fine. Instead, Sacco was unemployed for months.
• Feedback loops. These loops are responses to your behavior that inspire you to change or maintain it. If you shame someone and are congratulated, that positively reinforces your behavior and you’ll probably keep on shaming. As the shaming grows, you’ll just keep seeing posts from people who agree with you and your social media feeds become an echo chamber.

How to Respond to a Public Shaming

So you’ve been publicly shamed—what next? Ronson discovered that there are six approaches to recovering from a public shaming. (None of the approaches restore the victim’s life to what it was like before the shaming, and many of the solutions are fragile.)

Approach #1: Withdraw and Wait

Withdrawing includes shutting down social media accounts, refusing to give interviews, avoiding public places, and lying low until things blow over. This is a popular approach, though it doesn’t work particularly well—sometimes the shaming reincarnates when the shamee tries to return, and the shamee has to endure feelings of isolation.

Jonah Lehrer

For example, bestselling author Jonah Lehrer chose to withdraw when the news broke that he’d made up some of the Bob Dylan quotes that appeared in his most recent book, Imagine. He resigned from his job, refused interviews, and stayed home. The strategy didn’t work very well for him—after seven months, Lehrer tried to publicly apologize, but Twitter piled on again. When he tried to publish a new book, people mocked him. (Shortform note: Lehrer’s new book was eventually published to mixed reviews.)

Approach #2: Write a New Narrative

Before a public shaming, the victim has a life story. During the shaming, the public reduces the victim’s identity to revolve entirely around their transgression. Instead of holding on to the original narrative, approach #2 is to create a private third life narrative that explains the reasoning behind the transgression to reduce personal feelings of shame.

Mike Daisey

For example, like Jonah Lehrer, monologue writer and performer Mike Daisey committed literary fraud: He invented details in a non-fiction monologue about horrible working conditions at Apple factories that he performed on the podcast This American Life, among other venues. However, instead of withdrawing, he chose to create a new narrative.

Daisey told Ronson that he’d known in advance that if he went on the podcast someone would uncover his lies, but he decided to do it anyway because sacrificing his career was worth getting the story out. He cast himself as a hero to deal with his feelings of shame. He also defended himself online and responded to his shamers.

Approach #3: Become Emotionally Invulnerable to Shame

Becoming emotionally invulnerable to shame involves refusing to let shame affect you. To learn more about this approach, Ronson spoke to porn stars, who have to learn to manage shame because their industry is associated with it. Ronson interviewed Princess Donna Dolore, who said that if she publicly shared the things that embarrassed her, they were no longer embarrassing. One of her models, Jody Taylor, feels the same—she thinks that fiction, by nature, can’t be frightening or humiliating, so instead, the porn scenarios she performs are “awesome.”

Dolore’s goal is to make people feel less ashamed of what they want, and her work to demystify strange sex is probably part of the reason that fewer men are shamed for sex scandals these days.

Max Mosley

For example, Max Mosley chose to be invulnerable to shame when the news broke that he’d been involved in “sick” Nazi-themed orgies. He interviewed with BBC Radio 4 and agreed his sex life was strange, but he said people shouldn’t think badly of him for it. Mosley brought his actual personality closer to his public persona, unlike Lehrer, who was almost two entirely different people and was shamed for being two-faced.

Mosley also sued News of the World, the paper that had broken the story, because they’d written that the orgy was Nazi-themed, which, in reality, it wasn’t. It was only German-themed. Mosley won the case and as a result, most people see him as someone who was wronged.

Mosley’s decision to refuse to be ashamed certainly played a part in his outcome, but he probably also escaped shame because he was also a man in a consensual sex scandal.

Approach #4: Attend a Radical Honesty Workshop

Psychotherapist Brad Blanton believes shame thrives in secret—if you’re constantly worrying about what other people think or you’re worried about being exposed, you feel shame. Therefore, you can get rid of shame by being radically honest and telling everyone exactly what you’re thinking at all times. For example, if you want to sleep with your wife’s sister, you should tell both your wife and her sister this. You can learn how to break news like this, or spill any of your secrets, by attending a Radical Honesty workshop.

To Ronson, the Radical Honesty method seemed to be mainly people yelling at each other, and sometimes this went quite badly. For example, after the workshop Ronson attended, one man tried to be honest with his wife and she tried to physically push him away. He responded by saying that he was going to get an ax and defend himself by killing her. Unsurprisingly, she called the police.

Approach #5: Apply for the Right to Be Forgotten

In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that if an online text about someone was “inadequate, irrelevant...or excessive,” people could request that Google deindex the article or blog from its European sites. This means that, in theory, you could ask Google to remove shameful information about you from its search indexes.

While this ruling did result in a lot of material being deindexed—within three months, 70,000 people made requests—it also brought some of the things that people wanted buried back into the spotlight. As Google met requests, it sent automatic notices to media outlets letting them know their articles had been deindexed, which created resistance to the ruling. People started bringing up old stories again so they couldn’t be forgotten.

Approach #6: Hire a Reputation Management Company

Reputation management companies aim to hide shameful or damaging information about people by creating new online content that knocks undesirable content onto the second or third page of online search results. According to Google, 53% of people don’t look past the first two search results and almost 90% of people don’t ever click past the first page.

Lindsay Stone

For example, after a photo of Lindsay Stone screaming beside a cemetery sign that read “Silence and Respect” went viral, she connected with a reputation management company called Reputation.com. The photo was Stone’s entire internet presence, and also the entire presence of anyone else with the same name. She couldn’t get a job or date because anyone who googled her would instantly find the photo and conclude that she was a bad person.

Reputation.com knocked the photo lower in the search results by making Stone new social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr automatically show up high in the results because Google’s algorithm thinks these sites are popular). They wrote blog posts about travel, cats, top 40 music, and Stone’s other interests in her name.

It took four months of reputation management for the photo to start fading. When Stone googled herself, the photo showed up three or four times, but there were also lots of photos of Stone doing regular things, and photos of other Lindsey Stones. The reputation management process is ongoing, though, and Reputation.com calls Stone every week so she can approve Reputation.com’s latest content.