Shaming people absolutely works in some contexts. Like any other universal statement, “X doesn’t work” is almost always false. We need more detail.
Andrew Courtwright (M.D., PhD) has a cool article on this.
Cliffs: Public health campaigns that use shame to correct behavior sometimes work (smoking), sometimes don’t work (obesity), sometimes are moral (unsafe sex), sometimes are immoral (mental health).
Forgetting how utterly fucking wrong fat shaming is (or any shaming imo), personal change almost always requires the person wanting to change or seek truth for themselves. In fact, if their primary reason for changing their opinion of themselves (or dieting) is for others, it either doesn’t work or doesn’t stick
I’m not saying it’s 100%, but I think a psychology 101 class would bear me out on this. I guarantee you (and I’m sure others can attest) that I’m not changing myself or my opinions for you or anyone else. If I do change, it’s because someone was kind enough/polite enough to calmly show me the light
My unsupported guess is that without “shaming” the vax numbers would be much much lower.
Your guess is empirically false is some contexts. Shaming smokers works. Some other things too.
As someone who smoked for over 15 years, shaming was most def a large part of what helped me finally quit
Psychology 101, like economics 101, is so oversimplified it’s almost more wrong than right.
This is anecdotal. My uncle was a chain smoker his whole life and (I teased) while everyone shamed him relentlessly about it
One day he quit and the reason he gave was that HE decided to do it. Not anyone else. He made a deal with his wife (who used to smoke). If she stopped bugging him for two weeks, he’d quit and did. He now jokes that he probably smoked for years longer than he needed to if everyone would’ve stopped bugging him sooner
We all have stories that favor our side. But I’d point you to how well shaming works for Trump supporters for a real world example of how it definitely does not work!
Sounds like shame worked pretty good there iyam.
Shaming smokers works because a very large number of smokers already buy into the idea that smoking is bad. Shaming people to make them change their beliefs, particularly when those beliefs are tied up with some cultural identity, very obviously doesn’t work. I haven’t seen many success stories about shaming people out of QAnon.
Shaming is a highly effective method of molding the behavior of some people and near worthless when used against other people. There’s no one-size-fits-all technique of social control.
While shaming people for smoking, driving drunk or not wearing a seatbelt works now, these efforts took decades.
These shame campaigns will not work overnight. It took a long time to get these numbers to flip. I believe in ~1980, 15% of Americans wore seatbelts.
Don’t really remember shaming smokers ever really being a thing. Mostly it just stopped being actively promoted by movie stars and the health consequences gradually became more known.
I don’t even know what I was supposed to be ashamed of when I smoked. Maybe I don’t understand what others mean by shaming. As long as I was doing it outdoors or only indoors with fellow smokers I didn’t see how my bad habit was hurting anyone else. I quit because I knew it was bad for me and I don’t want to die.
What works is educated people with power making idiots get the shot. That’s it.
Are we factoring in policy changes to our definition of “shaming”?
In the smoking example, in addition to talking more about how unhealthy and gross smoking is we also banned smoking in lots of places. I was never a big smoker, but I did it even less once the law required me to leave the bar and stand outside in the cold and rain to get a fix. We also jacked up the cost of smoking significantly via taxes.
Maybe just shaming would have worked, but having real concrete consequences almost certainly accelerated the decline in the behavior both by increasing the cost and maybe by giving folks a face-saving out to justify their changing behavior on something other than the shaming they might have been getting from friends/family.
Man I remember how controversial it was when cities started banning smoking indoors. But it was absolutely incredible to come home from a bar not smelling like an ashtray.
I remember one of the biggest arguments being, “if there’s a demand for smoke free bars, you would observe some bars voluntarily choosing to be smoke free. Therefore no need to mandate.” Lol no, everyone realized how awesome it was to eat and drink without smoke within like three days, and there was close to zero backlash after that.
If shaming anti-vaxers can work at all it certainly won’t be done by comparing them to smokers or people who don’t wear a seat belt. They should be compared to drunk drivers.
GOAT anti drink drive ad.
EDIT. Apparantly the ad was so effective road deaths dropped 37% the following year.
In Canada as long as I can remember packs have been required to have an absolutely vile picture on them, showing stuff like a smokers lung, a child needing help breathing, a man in the hospital on a ventilator etc
Won’t post them, but these are the different varieties.
