Brooklyn welcome. [applause] thank you for having me. Pull that close up to your face so we can hear you. I just noticed that the guilty planet blog this is the book about shame you have a career that draws you to these negative emotions and creating works around is that true . It is true. I think that there are reasons that well continue to draw negative emotions to especially for largescale problems involving the environment or Animal Welfare or labor abuses anything like that. I mean, when i first heard about this book i was curious because when we think about shaming, we think about all these i dont want city evil things but distasteful things you get into some of them you. Think about the scarlet letter. Think about tarring and feathering. And you think about religious people who are maybe using a model that is predemocratic. And so i expected to disagree with this book a little bit more than i ended up disagreeing with it because you do address those things. So explain a little bit how you came to this topic and how you ended up writing a book about reclaiming the value of shame. Well, i was comparing guilt and shame and the way theyd been used especially by the Environmental Movement especially over the last 20 to 30 years itch think old tools that activists reached for were primarily shaming tools. And now, todays movement is much more prone to reaching to guilt and diswaging that guilt with engaging guilty people through consumerism. So you feel guilty for flying or guilty for consuming pesticide, or guilty for supporting unfair labor, so you buy crueltyfree carbonneutral organic certified fair trade products. And my interest was in this dynamic in and the way we were engaging this minority of really concerned people and engaging them as consumers rather than as activists, and this tool of guilt then eclipsing what i would see as an older and more effective tool, shame in part because shame can scale to institutional levels, even to government levels, and an example i give in the book is sees senior chavez who protested the famous grape boycott, and would not have been satisfied if this ill the solution to that problem was industry saying, look were going to certify bart of the tart of the grapes that pay mike grant workers fair wages and well allow consumers who want to buy those grapes to purchase them and those grapes will have a label that say, public by farmworkers that earned a minimum wage and then allow the rest of consumers, who are unconcerned, to continue buying the same old thing. He would not have been i don think, satisfied with Something Like that because his concern was the changing the entire industry, not just a very small portion of it. This is the way now though, that we have come to engage with so many other problems. And so i think that this focus has an inherently shifted the burden to the demand side of the equation rather than the supply side. And shame really is still one of those tools that focuses on supply. So let me open that up. I youre like me you go to a progressive supermarket and you think youre doing the right thing because youre buying something with the organic label. We know a little bit more about how that organic label gets taken or used or gets in some cases bought, but it still seems like im doing this thing its a step in the right direction, the first step that is certainly better than buying the dirtiest of proproduce. But you actually flip that around and say its really not a great first step. Can you unpack that a little bit . Yes. I dont argue its not better. Theres no doubt that its better than buying the other thing. But if if you view it as your prime mar way of engaging that might detrimental. If you do something good in one domain then you can do something bad in another, and this is demonstrated as a followingal phenomenon across the board. Also again, i think what happened historically was that this really concerned minority would make trouble and raise the ire of certain people and then the majority would sort of step out of the way and what has happened now instead is that the really concerned minority now just goes to whole foods and that is not sufficient for changing the entire market. So even organic foods, one of the Fastest Growing sectors, people think is highly visible. Still only accounts for four percent of the u. S. Food market. That just shows you, its not leading to a significant decrease in Pesticide Usage and if threat our end goal because if everyone else is eating nonorganic food and its getting in ore water supply we have to consider engaging maybe at a higher level. I want to get into this question of how you came to this. I think you were involved in looking into fisheries . Yes. Could you explain how that all came about and what that led you to understood about the labeling problem. I studied economic soyuz was interested in supply and demand and i was interested in microeconomics, the household consumer. I got interested in these tools like wallet cards and ecolabels for seafood, and this let me i sort of pulled on the thread, and this whole thing unraf done raveled. And they all had Similar Properties in that there was a tendency to lower the standards of what those things actually meant, because that meant more things could be certified because theres actually more demand than supply can meet. So in the case of fisheries the idea of what is sustainable has been that bar has just lowered and lowered over time and also i was mentioning i dont see any of these products representing more than 10 of the entire marketplace. So, in terms of what kind of big solution they offer, its really the jury is still very far from in. Did you you studied economics for six years . As an undergrad and then master student, and then i decided to come to my senses and did my ph. D as a biologist. Im amatessed you still speak english so well after the study of economics. This all really started when you were a girl. You saw video of did you just see you saw the can first and the labeling. I saw a photograph. I opened the book with the case of me and feeling the most my First Experience with guilt that was not just about something i had done and affected those around me, but actually affecting somebody i never met before a wild dolphin. So i got a photograph in the mail because id written those group called the Earth Island Institute when i was nine years old, and opened up the return letter and it was all about how tuna fishing was killing dolphins and there was this very very, i would say now scarring image of a dolphin being hoisted and killed onboard the tuna boat. Some that was my first it was very profound feeling of guilt for something i had done that had affected something that i cared about and had never met. And i was not alone in that at awe all. There were so many millions of School Children who insisted their parents boycott tuna and that led to the dolphin safe logo and that is one of those logo us i was suggesting is one of these red flags about how we engage with the issue. As soon as the logo was introduced, we began buying tuna again, and i thought that the trouble was over. And thats so i realize now the fallacy in thinking that way. I was nine. Fair enough. But some of this you came to unpack a little bit more later. This i maybe the seed that was planted. What you end up describing very early in the book is how that shift happens, puts the onus on consumers rather than on the corporations or on governments. The dolphinsafe logo was the first ecolabel of its type. Prior to that it had been the organic food label was the earliess. That signaled something about the product itself. Said this strawberry is actually fundamentally different than this other strawberry. This says the tuna is the same about i was caught differently. So i earmark this as a big moment in environmental history if you think of that as being a big moment but i think it does for me ill really characterized the shift extracting us from focusing on supply and focusing on demand. You give other examples of how Even Economic incentives incentives and disincentives can actually do shortterm good maybe but then have longterm negative consequences. One that stuck out was the israeli day care center. Very famous example. Can you unpack that . There was a pretty famous study on daycares in israel were parentsre coming too late too often, and so the daycare said, were tired of the parents coming so late. Were going to introduce a fine. And when they did that, the number of late pickups actually increased significantly. Because parents thought oh, what a relief. I all i have to do is pay a fine now. So where they had had this guilt or shame prior, they replaced that with a marketbased punishment and the daycare realized this quickly and tried to change their policy back, and they never could get the number of late pickups as low again. So, theyve actually in theres been more research subsequently but showing how markets and the willingness to exchange a behavior for money can actually erode the standard. Right. So, some of this has to do with just to dive in on this guilt versus shame you describe guilt as an individual feeling that is tethered to maybe a subjective bar that we all have inside us, that can vary across people. I think thats where shame becomes preferable because shame is not as individualistic . I describe guilt as a tool, if you want to theres the emotion and then also the tool and it is the tool to regulate your own behavior. Its the your internal dialogue between you and your conscience. Shame is about the threat of social exposure or exposure to public program. And for that reason its much more calibrated to the entire group, and the really interesting thing is that for that reason, shame can scale up to institutions, to governments to a marketplace even in a way that guilt really cant. You cant say that google has some sort of internal conscience but you could worry google does worry vary much about its public reputation. They scalability is interesting. You also talk about some examples that are i think we talk about how guilt hasnt worked in some of these cases or how putting it on to the consumer points to the consumers guilt rather than keeping the onus on the collective principle. You talk about norms. Talk now that we have been into this conversation for a little while. Its a wonderful read and very scholarly butler fast read so i enjoyed it very much. Theres just so many examples. What are some of your favorites of the tool of shame working really well. Yes. So again, i just want to caveat by saying guilt is a great regulator and we should all hope that society could be dealt with so well because its the cheapest form but if it doesnt work and if youre left wondering why and if the government is also failing you in certain ways enforcing rules or failing to pass legislation then you might turn to harsher forms of punishment. A few examples i like are the rain forest action and the sierra club, looking at mountaintop removal in appalachia and trying to work with local governments to get it stopped. Failing that aspect failed. So instead they they werent able to go after really the Coal Companies because consumers north fame to this Coal Companies. Instead they traced the financing hoff the Coal Companies to nine banks and published the nine banks year after year and how to they were financing, at what scale and that started in 20 10. Last year was the fifth year of the campaign and wells fargo and j p morgan announced they were cutting ties with the coal company. So this is not obviously stopping mountaintop removal entirely but it is halting the progress and making the other banks very afraid about the way the standards are tipping. Another example i like is green peace, they went after a bunch of big box retailers for selling unsustainable sea footed, and they would rank the retailers and year after year are year trader joes kept coming up in the bottom third of this ranking. And they said thats so strange because the consumer that trader joes really care. So in 2009 they launched the traitor joes campaign. They took out a full page ad in the new york times. They had demonstrations at many trader joes across the nation. They had a really cool internet platform where their volunteers could use that platform to call managers around the nation and it sent a singing fish telegram, begging to stop selling unsustainable seafoods. I was playful and also intense exposure, and as a result trader joes moved up that campaign very church its very obvious as a result from Something Like 19th on the list to fourth on the list, and gave up a lot of their now, did that solve the problem of selling unsustainable seafood . No. Are we eventually going to need i think probably serious legislation in place . Yes. But shaming can act as a stop gap in a way that i dont see any evidence of guilt really working at that scale. Yes. I want to come back to that because it seems like where we have gone we started with the consumer looking at labels to sort of more suppliers. Eventually we need to get to government. We can. But before we move on i want to throw back something you said. Guilt is the cheapest form of this tool. What does that mean . Is that economic lingo . It is not if you think about punishment from an evolutionary aspect, and they line up in cost. Punishment is costly. Its very interesting, too. Punishment this is getting really technical but punishment and reward are really different in the sense that reward is me transferring something great, nobel prize to you. But punishment is like me taking a hit of some form some small cost or you can imagine like itself was a physical confrontation, potentially a large cost, to then deprive you of something. So we both wind up paying a cost. And we can see this. Punishment in society, at the individual and the government level, are all costly. Prison is a very costly system. Right . And not yes economic terms, but just in terms of resources, effort whatever. So imagine the best form of punishment is where you punish yourself, you bear the cost. Of changing the behavior. Exactly. Thats what get is supposed to do. So when a little kid asks why die feel pain . Why does pain exist . That to keep your body in intact and prevent you from doing harm. So guilt and shame are similar but guilt is maybe aiming more at the individual just to bead beat a dead horse the self. Thats why is debate whether guilt is a universal emotion and a universal tool. A lot of eastern cultures dont have a word for guilt. Shakespeare used the word guilt 33 times, used the word shame 344 times. Its very likely that guilt is a much more recent much more we were much more individualistic concept, and emotion than shame is. So if were in the territory of guilt, were potentially in very subjective territory, where i could drink away my guilt and go and hide and might not lead to better behavior if im a ceo or a politician or something. Yes, and the shame is true of shame. Either of these things were perfect we wouldnt have harsher forms of punish. Arrest look at bad examples of shame. Thats always fun. Shaming is a said before its something i have negative connotations toward, and you have plenty of examples in the book of the new potentials for use of shame in knew media, but at its worst it can lead to maybe things not going well, the behavior or the norm not changing, people hiding from shame, i think appear in your book. Talk about the different kinds of results you can get to with shame. Its not just at the individual level. Corporations and governments all display these similar behaviors and the various ways you can escape shaming. So the different responses to shame i open up that chapter with a case very charming, actually of bruceis may the own are othe titanic who was on board the night the titanic went down and he unlike the captain, managed to escape and survive, and he felt a tremendous amount of well, whether or not he felt it we cant say because i dont know what he looked like. I didnt measure his hormones and thats the only way to know somebodys internal state. But he exhibited a lot of signs of having been shamed. One of the first things he did on the boat that picked up the survivors, is he inverted his name in the cables so, rather than signing ismay he sign him nice yamsi, and actually joseph conrad, who attended some of the hearings about the titanic, referred to him as the luckless yansi, and he also was in hiding on she ship. He wouldnt come out and face anyone. These are two of like signs that the shaming is really powerful and you may or may not be getting the ideal outcome afterwards. In lit temporary terms sometimes shame are is equated with your social persona dying. Its really intense. So he was removing himself from the things he loved which were society. He was hiding. He said he wasnt going out in public. And he was changing his identity. Shame latches ton reputation. So we also see Phillip Morris preferring to be called altrea or bp considering changing its name after the deep water horizon. Blackwater changed its name. You can see these similar tendencies, among groups government its much harder to change but it still does happen. Change the parties. You change parties. Or change the name of a technique, like torture becomes enhanced interrogation technique. Right. So online examples appear. I dont know if you read the new john ronson book with the example of justine sacca but there were a lot of examples of maybe shaming going awry with newie and what people have learned. Maybe its not always pleasant. You draw the line between a kind of shaming that changes bad behavior on one hand without ruining a life on the other hand and that seems to be the is that part of what you described in the chapter called the sweet spot of shaming. Like antibiotics, depending on the right dose at the right time and you can overdue it or underdo it. One issue with the internet comes back to individuals and individual behavior but is right now what we see as disproportionate punishment. That individuals who are saying something glib are being punished in a much harsher much more longlasting form, than people who commit actual physical crimes. And this is a strange moment that i actually dont think is going to last that much longer. Part of the disproportionate aspect is because theres so much anonymity online and because its had so far been the sort of wild west and were seeing all of that reined in at the moment. Id be remiss during the last day of black History Month if i didnt proudly mention your example of rosa parks. How does she fit into this story of using shame well and Martin Luther king of course. It was just a great line of Martin Luther kings, in the book about how which i included in the book about how the purpo