TL;DR: Shame is essential in a society, where the law cannot (and should not) regulate all aspects of human interaction. Shame holds individuals to a group standard and is used to enforce norms, and I think environmentalists are far too squeamish about using it. But shame works on behaviour and has a poor record on beliefs, so where we aim it matters a lot.
The part I'll defend
A while ago (when Twitter was still good) I said publicly that private jet use deserves to be shamed, which caused a bit of furore. I still think I was right. (So I guess their shaming of my views had no impact!)
The case is simple. Billionaires have a massively disproportionate carbon footprint, and private jets are one of the most extreme examples. The cost falls on people already dealing with climate-driven heatwaves and floods, while the benefit on the other side is mostly convenience.
The most common objection was some version of climate guilt: none of us is perfect, so who are we to criticise? I don’t find that persuasive. Everyone has a carbon footprint, but there is a big difference between taking the train to see family and flying private for a weekend away, and being imperfect yourself doesn’t stop you seeing that difference.
The second objection was behavioural, and considerably better: environmentalists who moralise get read as nags, and nags get tuned out. I take the point. But realistically, overall demand for flying has got to decrease in absolute terms, and much more so for private jets. Tons of research shows that visible people have a big influence on the aspirational lifestyles of others, so if someone positions themselves as an environmentalist then they need to lead by example.
There is a place for judgement in a society. We judge people who drink and drive, or cheat on their partners, because those actions hurt other people. Private jets cause real harm too, and that deserves to be treated the same way. The aim is for private jets to attract disapproval where they currently attract envy, and that means more people shaming, not fewer.
Why this works
The instinctive model of shaming is that you make the target feel bad and the target changes. I don't think that's where most of the effect lives.
Greg Sparkman and colleagues found that Americans underestimate support for climate policy by nearly half. Actual support is around 66 to 80 per cent, but people estimate it at 37 to 43 per cent. We are collectively wrong about each other in a way that suppresses action, because nobody speaks up, so everybody concludes that nobody minds.
Public sanctioning fixes that specific error. When you visibly object to something, the people learning from it are the bystanders rather than the person you objected to, and what they learn is that the norm exists and that it gets enforced. So the people watching matter more than the person being shamed.
The part I've talked myself out of
Until recently I thought the obvious next step was to point all of this at climate denial. Something like: treat denialism as a contagion to be contained, and change the mores around discussing it so that deniers no longer feel able to share their beliefs publicly, in the way that people are now (mostly) ashamed to voice racist or sexist views. It felt continuous with everything above.
I'm not so sure anymore.
The classic successes are behaviours. Drink driving, smoking indoors, littering. Every one of them is an act with an identifiable harm, whereas denialism is a belief, whereas denialism is a belief, and the difference matters for how shame works. The guilt and shame literature (June Tangney's work is the standard entry point) finds that guilt is behaviour focused and prompts repair, while shame is self focused and prompts withdrawal, defensiveness and counter-attack. Attack an act and you leave space for people to comply. Attack a belief and you attack the person holding it, so the person defends themselves.
When I was thinking about how to test this, my hypothesis was that non-believers would stay entrenched while the unsure would improve. I think that's still likely to be the case. But if it's true, then the mechanism was never containment at all, and it was the bystanders again. And if the goal is really to correct what the unsure believe about the state of the consensus, there are ways of doing that which don't require anyone to be publicly humiliated, (and which don't hand the denial movement the persecution narrative it runs on).
The public health framing cuts against me. I reached for disease language, which is awkward, because stigma is one of the best documented backfire effects in public health. In HIV, in obesity and in addiction, stigma suppresses disclosure, drives people away from services, and makes outcomes worse. If denialism is a disease, evidence says don't stigmatise the patient.
And the racism comparison doesn't hold. Those norms attach to expressed contempt for people, and they shifted over decades through law and stigma working together, whereas denialism is an empirical error. Being wrong about the evidence and being cruel to people are different problems, and I wouldn’t expect one tool to fix both.
There's also a point I find harder to dismiss than I used to. A norm that suppresses the expression of a belief you're confident is false and harmful is a tool that works identically for whoever holds it next, on whichever belief they happen to be confident about. I don't get to be the one who decides which beliefs qualify.
So when is shaming justified?
My current answer is four conditions, all of which need to hold:
- It's a behaviour, not a belief.
- The harm is real and attributable to that behaviour rather than to a category of person.
- The target has agency and a realistic alternative. This is why shaming someone for driving to work in a town with no buses is both cruel and useless, while shaming a private jet is neither.
- The act is visible enough that the audience can learn the norm from the sanction. If nobody sees it, you've just been needlessly unpleasant to someone.
Private jets pass all four, as do fossil fuel sponsorship deals, greenwashing campaigns, and executives who fly private to climate conferences. Climate denial passes the second at a stretch and fails the first outright.
Note, this may also apply to animal advocacy. Shaming individual meat-eaters fails condition 3 for a lot of people, who have limited time, money or options where they live, and it tends to produce exactly the defensiveness Tangney describes. Corporate campaigns aim at organisations that have both agency and realistic alternatives, and whose decisions are public.
