As the ball tampering scandal continues to unfold, an unsurprising barrage of public shaming shows no signs of letting up.
Cricket greats, teammates and fans are among those slamming captain Steve Smith and his accomplices for conspiring to tamper with the ball during the third Test against South Africa.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that he was “bitterly disappointed” by the incident, while former Australian vice-captain Adam Gilchrist called the Australian team the "laughing stock of world sport."
As Steve Smith left South Africa, wild scenes emerged of fans booing him as security hastily escorted him through Johannesburg airport.
When admitting to the tampering immediately after the event, Smith said he was "embarrassed" and "incredibly sorry for trying to bring the game into disrepute the way we did." He was also quick to defend his position vowing to remain captain in the immediate aftermath of the scandal.
But not everyone thinks public shaming or shame itself is the appropriate response to a public misdeed.
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The problem with shame
Professor June Tangney of George Mason University in the United States is one psychologist who believes public shaming is a concerning act.
“One of the things that we found is that feelings of shame don't generally encourage people to change their behaviour,” Dr Tangney told Insight.
“Feelings of guilt about a behaviour can move people towards apology, confession, reparation, but feelings of shame about the self seem to encourage more of defensiveness, denial.”
Tangney says the simple way to distinguish between guilt and shame is by asking whether the individual feels bad about themselves or the people they have affected. As well as this, when one is caught during the act, an apology can’t be taken as a sign of guilt.
“Shame is different, shame is more self-focused, more selfish, it's about me; I'm such a bad person,” Dr Tangney told Insight.
“They want to sink into the floor and disappear, they want to escape, they want to deny, they want to hide in some way, but they're not so much pressed towards the problem - the behaviour - and fixing the behaviour and its consequences.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has refused to front a British committee to explain the Cambridge Analytica data breach. Photo: AAP Source: AAP
Shame and empathy
Facebook CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has recently seen his sincerity come into question following his response to the mammoth discovery that his website had been used by Cambridge Analytica as a platform to collect data on 50 million users.
"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you," he stated when he broke his five-day silence on Facebook.
“This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” said Zuckerberg in a public statement.
Facebook users were quick to point out that his apology would have been more convincing had Facebook done something at the time they discovered the third party misuse and if they’d refrained from threatening to bring a civil case against the reporters who broke the story.
One psychologist, Robin Grille, believes that shame gets in the way of the development of empathy.
“Shaming is almost the opposite of remorse, it doesn't produce the actual empathic concern for the feelings of another person,” Grille told Insight.
“If we behave well after having been shamed, that's not out of care or remorse for the other person … we're out to improve our own image to get the approval back.”
