Four Personas of Self-Righteous Shaming
Ernest Adams and I talked about the dangers of Self-Righteous Shaming, and the different personas it can take. As always, feedback welcome!
It’s the responsibility of upstanders to intervene when they notice bias, prejudice or bullying. But attempting to coerce people into changing their attitudes or behavior by indulging in self-righteous shaming isn’t going to work. Remember, Radical Respect optimizes for collaboration, it doesn’t seek to coerce through force or shame.
Often we think, incorrectly, that our intentions in shaming are good: we are trying to defend a vulnerable individual or a group of people who are being disrespected. Or perhaps we have been shamed ourselves, and so it feels fine to fight fire with fire. Or we are just fed up with a broken system that isn’t working for us, so we lash out at a person rather than trying to fix the system. Or perhaps the people we are shaming are more powerful than we are, so we assume they somehow deserve it or can take it.
Self-Righteous Shaming is an act of vengeance, not repair. It is a form of bullying, and fighting bullying with bullying isn’t going to reduce bullying. Ultimately — insofar as we know at some level that it won’t work — is an act of despair. Or, sometimes, it’s just communicating in bad faith in hopes of gaining something. Given how addictive the rush of shaming others is, and how social media tend to facilitate this kind of communication, self-righteous shaming is on the rise like a sickening virus, and it is spilling over from social networks into today’s workplaces.
Self-righteous shaming happens on the right and on the left. If you’re on the left, you’re probably thinking about how it applies to people on the right–or maybe you’re the self critical type who notices it on the left, too. Ditto in reverse if you’re on the right. The truth is we all do it from time to time, unfortunately.
No matter which side of an issue the self-righteous shaming is coming from, it is invariably counterproductive. It’s mean and it doesn’t work. Think about it. When was the last time you changed your behavior because someone shamed you in some way?
It is vital to understand the difference between feeling shame and being shamed. When we are held accountable for something we have done or said that harms others, we often feel shame, even though the person who pointed out the problem is not shaming us, but rather is giving us valuable feedback. When we feel ashamed, we tend to retreat into denial or to go on the attack — perhaps both. Instead we must learn to work through our feelings of shame and get to a place where we recognize what we have done wrong.
As an upstander, you don’t want to indulge in self-righteous shaming, and you don’t want to allow another person’s feelings of guilt or shame to silence you, either. This can feel like a tricky tightrope.
How can you make sure you are intervening in a way that is productive? First, make sure not to put yourself at the center of the drama. Don’t make the situation about you and your virtue and fearlessness in confronting bad behavior. Don’t imagine you are standing up “for” someone as a result of your own superiority. You are standing up “to” injustice, and you’re doing it for everyone’s sake–your own, your teammates, the person harmed and the person causing harm. Your goal is to fix the problem, not to signal your virtue.
Several different “personas” of self-righteous shaming can be particularly dangerous to your efforts to be an effective upstander:
- moral grandstanding
- the Incredible Hulk
- the knight in shining armor
- the White savior
MORAL GRANDSTANDING
Few things will kill good communication on a team faster than moral grandstanding: when some people talk about sensitive topics in a way that shames others and puts themselves on a pedestal of virtue.3 Moral grandstanding usually results in deeper misunderstanding, and it almost always exacerbates the problem it purports to want to fix.
Online communications, in particular social networks, speed up the process by which we exaggerate both our own virtue and the perfidy of others. In the real world people tend to show their annoyance at self- righteousness, so there’s a natural slow-down mechanism. For example, if you jump on your soapbox in a meeting, subtle eyerolls will warn you to get off. But there are no subtle eyerolls online. Moral grandstanding gets rewarded with likes and shares online, creating more of it and a more extremist, toxic environment.4 Our online tools have not benefited from the evolutionary learning of our “IRL” responses. This snowball effect also explains why it’s even more important for leaders to confront both moral grandstanding and the behaviors it’s most often objecting to– bias, prejudice, and bullying–when managing teams working remotely than when everyone is working together in person. The answer is obviously not to ignore bias, prejudice, and bullying because leaders are tired of the drama that the moral grandstanding creates…The answer is to teach people more effective responses to bias, prejudice and bullying.
Moral grandstanding tends to be used more by people on the extremes of both sides of any issue. And it’s a vicious cycle.In an environment with a lot of self-righteous finger-pointing, people tend to move to the extremes.5
Moral grandstanding makes things worse, not better. Research shows that most of us tend to believe in our own superiority along any number of dimensions, especially our moral judgment. This moral certainty, ironically, makes us unaware of our own moral failings.6 That’s why shaming other people rarely causes them to look carefully at their own behavior. Rather, it causes them to retreat deeper into their sense of moral superiority.7 It’s very hard to listen to criticism from someone who is shaming you. This fixed mindset leads to the kind of denial that renders otherwise tractable problems insoluble.
The Reverend Dr. Jamie Washington offers excellent advice for avoiding self-righteous shaming. 11 He explains the difference between “calling out” and “calling in.” Calling in invites people to consider one another’s experiences and thoughts rather than getting locked in a vicious cycle of “convicting, converting, and convincing.”12
Inviting in may not give you the jolt of instant gratification that shaming others or hurling an insult does. Admittedly, having a difficult conversation won’t give you the quick-hit rush that condemning another person wholesale often provides. It’s hard work. But, unlike shaming, this work creates a more collaborative, less coercive environment. You get more out of it than you put into it.
This is especially important in an era of remote work and communication tools that allow us to broadcast harsh judgments from behind the safety of a screen.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
Sometimes it’s tempting to try to out-bully the bully. Don’t give in to that temptation. I have been guilty of this, and the results were not good…
My team and I were pushing hard on a project late one Friday night when Amy, a woman who’d recently joined the company right out of college, came into my office in tears. Charles, a guy on another team, had taken one look at some analysis she’d done and said, “There you go doing sales math again. I am an engineer, don’t worry your pretty little head about the math.”
When she told me this, I was pissed.
“That little sh*thead pip-squeak!” I exclaimed. “Watch this.”
I picked up the phone, and when Charles answered, I started shout- ing. I was behaving like an asshole and enjoying myself way more than I should have. (Helpful hint for avoiding self-righteous shaming: if it feels too good to say it or to hit send, stop!)
Years later, as my sister and I were watching The Avengers with our kids, a scene reminded me of this incident. Loki, the bad guy, says to the Hulk, “I am a god, you dull creature.”
The Hulk looks at him for a moment, then picks Loki up by the feet and smashes his head on the ground. Bam bam. Pause. Bam bam bam. Pause. Bam bam to the left, to the right, to the center a few times, back to the left. Loki is left humiliated and unable to get up.
“Puny god,” Hulk says, stomping off in disgust.
Something about that scene so perfectly encapsulated the way bullying makes me want to respond–just grab the person by the ankles and smash them all around. The way I treated Charles was a Hulk moment for me. But did it make the situation better for Amy? No! I had engaged in bullying myself. Ultimately I regretted my behavior.
About five years later, my husband wound up working on a project with Charles. When Andy mentioned I was his wife, Charles’s eyes grew wide. “You are married to Kim Scott?”
“What in the hell did you do to that guy?” my husband asked with a concerned laugh over dinner. I’d given in to my Incredible Hulk fantasy and acted like a complete asshole, that’s what. Not who I want to be.
THE KNIGHT-IN-SHINING-ARMOR
The desire to help others is good. But when it becomes about you, not fairness, your help may not be so welcome. You may be reflecting and reinforcing the stereotype, in fact.
If you cast the person being harmed in the role of damsel in distress, for example, you reinforce the problem that you’re supposed to be interrupting. I have been cast in that role several times by well-meaning colleagues, and let me assure you: I didn’t like it, and it wasn’t helpful to me one bit.
WHITE-SAVIOR COMPLEX
A related but different complex happens when White people arrogantly decide they are going to “save” Black people and are in a position to do so because they are “better” in some way. One predominantly White private school I knew bragged that their high school students had designed houses for people in a developing country. These kids’ parents wouldn’t trust their children to design a woodshed on their own property. Where did they get the notion that they could design houses that people would actually live in? This is just White supremacy in a different cloak. This approach often demonstrates that the White colleagues are in fact unaware of their own racism.8 Teju Cole has written about “The White Savior Industrial Complex.” He explains it “is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”
